Privacy policy
Last updated 27 September 2026
In short: we collect what's needed to benchmark your farm, use it only to run bench.farm, and never sell it or share it with anyone outside the service. Other farms only ever see your figures pooled with several others; your own group's leaders see your submitted figures by name.
Who we are
bench.farm is operated by Charles Quick, trading as CSEQ Technologies Ltd, who is the data controller for the information described here. The service is self-funded and run for the benefit of farmers, and is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), registration number ZC259198. You can contact us at admin@bench.farm.
What we collect
- Your account: your email address, your name if you give it, and your password — stored only as a secure one-way hash, so nobody can read it.
- At sign-up: whether you used AHDB Farmbench, and the discussion group you name, so we can put your farm in the right group.
- If you ask for an invite code: your business name, address, phone number and email, used only to decide on the request. They can be deleted once it's dealt with.
- Your farm: its name, postcode, region and groups.
- Your farm's figures: what you enter or import — areas, yields, prices, costs, fertiliser and manures, machinery, notes and so on. This includes the labour register: if you list staff, we hold the name you give each person (initials are fine) with their hours and pay. If you enter staff, please let them know.
- Activity: when your account was last used, to the minute, so we can see who's online before updating the service.
- Server logs: like any website, the server records the IP address, the page asked for and the browser used for each visit. These are kept for security and troubleshooting, for no longer than 30 days.
How we use it
- To run the service you've asked for: your reports, trends and analysis, and the comparisons with national figures and other farms.
- To email you about your account — invite codes, password resets — and messages from your group's leaders or from us about the service.
- To keep the service secure and working.
We don't use your data for advertising, don't profile you, and don't sell it.
Who sees your figures
- You see everything you enter.
- Other members never see your farm's figures. If you share a year — which you can turn off at any time — its submitted figures are pooled into anonymous cohort averages. A cohort is only shown when at least five other farms are in it, when each quartile within it spans at least three farms, and when no single farm makes up more than half its area. Rankings among members show a position, never another farm's figures.
- Your group's leaders see the submitted figures of the farms in their group, by name, along with any note you've written on the year. Joining a group is agreeing to that, and you can leave a group at any time.
- The operator runs the server and so can technically see all the data held on it. We only look at your data where it's needed to run, fix or support the service.
Figures you're still entering, and changes since you last submitted, aren't seen by anyone else until you submit them.
No sharing outside bench.farm
We do not share, sell or give your data to any third party — not AHDB, not suppliers, not buyers, not advertisers. The national figures in your reports are AHDB's own published benchmarks; nothing flows back to them.
Two service providers necessarily handle data on our behalf, only to run bench.farm and under our instructions: the company that hosts our server, which stores the data, and our email provider, which delivers the emails described above.
Cookies
We use one cookie, which keeps you signed in. Your browser also remembers a few display choices on your own device, such as whether the scratchpad is open. There are no advertising or tracking cookies, and no analytics services.
How long we keep it
Your account and farm data are kept for as long as you have an account. Deleting your account, from your account page, removes it and all your farms and figures straight away. Backups of the database, and server logs, are kept for no longer than 30 days, so anything deleted is gone from those too within 30 days.
Security
All connections to bench.farm are encrypted, passwords are stored only as secure hashes, and access to the server is restricted to the operator.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask for a copy of the data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, delete it, or stop using it, and ask for it in a form you can take elsewhere. Much of this you can do yourself: edit anything on your farm pages, download reports as CSV, and delete your account. For anything else, email admin@bench.farm. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
Changes
If we change this policy we'll update the date at the top, and tell members by email of anything significant.