Farmers and contractors wanted to trial a free online tool that values your machinery for insurance, ideally if your renewal falls between January and April 2027.
Most of us know the drill: the insurance renewal lands, there’s a schedule of kit on it, and half the values were typed in years ago and rolled forward ever since or deprecated by the accountants. Renewal falls at a point where you don’t have the time to go through every tractor, trailer, drill and implement properly, so you tick it and move on. Then something gets nicked or burnt out, and you find the payout doesn’t come close to buying a replacement.
With second-hand prices where they’ve been the last couple of years, a value that was right three years ago probably isn’t now. Some second-hand prices have even gone up. And it’s rarely the big tractor that catches people out; it’s the GPS kit, the compressor, the pressure washer, the gator or the tools in the workshop that never made it onto the schedule at all.
That’s the problem the Virtual Shed is aiming to solve. It’s a project funded through Innovate UK and Defra’s ADOPT scheme, led by Clive Bailye at TWB Farms with Stephen Butler of North West Services, alongside Agri Web Media (Direct Driller Magazine and The Farming Forum), Acres Insurance Brokers and AMTEC Machinery. The idea is simple enough. You list your kit in your own private online shed, and the tool checks real prices from dealers, classifieds and auctions to give you three figures per machine: what it would sell for, what you’d get as a trade-in and what it would cost to replace for insurance. It then gives you a report you can send straight to your broker, and it can refresh those values every month rather than once a year.
We’re not asking anyone to take that on trust, and this is a trial. Before a single farmer touches it, the tool will value 500 machines, and those same machines will be valued independently by Acres and AMTEC as well. We want it within 10 per cent on at least eight in every ten machines. If it can’t do that, it doesn’t go out. But the aim is to always produce a range, say £48,000 – £51,000.
Picking which 500 machines to test wasn’t guesswork either. The Farming Forum’s classifieds now carry over 4,000 dealer and private adverts, which gave us a decent picture of what’s actually for sale out there. Tractors are over a fifth of it, while tractors, cultivation kit, drills and telehandlers make up nearly half between them. However, two-thirds of the dated tractors are 2020 or newer, and most farm sheds don’t look like that. So, the test set leans further towards older kit than the adverts do, and every category gets enough machines – not just the obvious ones – to prove whether it works or not. The classifieds themselves are a separate thing, but the data saved us a lot of head scratching.
Where you come in
The trial runs from 1 December 2026 to the end of April 2027, and we’re looking for farmers and contractors in England to use it for real. It’s most useful if your machinery insurance renews somewhere in that window, because the whole point is to test it against a genuine renewal, not a made-up one.
A core group of 20 to 30 will do it properly: time how long the usual manual revaluation takes, then do the same job in the Virtual Shed, and tell us honestly how the two compare. Changes will be monitored monthly, and changes logged as percentages. There’ll be a short catch-up every fortnight and a survey in February. Alongside the core group, we want a wider group of up to around 200, who simply use it at their own renewal and let us know how they got on alongside their own research. Arable, livestock, mixed, big or small, a couple of tractors or a full contracting fleet – we want the lot.
It costs nothing to take part, and your data stays private. When the trial’s done, we will evaluate how good the tool is and see if it is ready to be launched live. We want the tool to be free for farmers to use at the point of insurance renewal, and we’ll publish a plain guide to valuing machinery on The Farming Forum for anyone who wants it.
If you’re up for it, scan the QR code or follow the link to register your interest. It takes about two minutes. And if you’ve been caught short on a claim before, we’d like to hear about that too.