First4Farming was formed in December 2000 by a consortium of 12 companies all from the agricultural supply chain in the UK. The consortium which was a mix of distributors, merchants, agricultural co-operatives, manufacturing businesses and traders came together with a common purpose. A desire to change the way in which business and trade was handled between them.
The original twelve companies were:

Frontier Agriculture, BOCM PAULS, Masstock Arable, DuPont, Syngenta, Terra Fertilisers, Merial Animal Health, Yara, Kemira, Mole Valley Farmers, Bank of Scotland, and Reed Business Information.

Many of these companies traded between each other and as was the norm at that time all transactions were handled manually with orders being placed by post or fax or phone, despatch advices and weigh tickets carried by the lorry drivers and almost 100% of invoices being posted using the postal system.

Doing business in this way was of course resource intensive, slow and prone to errors simply through the personnel having to re-key information from paper to the computer system or accounts package. Hence the original focus for the founding participants was to reduce the significant volumes of paper based transactions by automating transactional document exchange and thereby eliminate dual manual data entry, eliminate errors and eliminate RFC’s and credit investigations. (see table 1 below)

 However there was a further objective which was round enabling Supply Chain efficiencies. For example the sharing of inventory data between distributors and their suppliers, co-operation on logistic administration, sales data sharing again between distributors and their suppliers, traceability of product through the supply chain and master data and code translation. (See table 2 below)

None of this was practical when dealing manually through paper based systems but became simpler and possible when dealing electronically between trading partners.

The original 12 partners created a an e-commerce community, which by virtue of the critical mass of businesses amongst those 12 founding partners and shareholders would set standards for electronic communication in agriculture in the UK.

Since then the number of participants has grown not only within the UK but also in new regions of the world.

In 2002, F4F Australia was formed along identical lines to the UK business with a critical mass of the main participants in the sector and a mix of distribution and their main suppliers.  (These businesses being Elders, AWB Landmark, Incitec Pivot, Bayer CropScience, Syngenta & NuFarm).
In 2005 a new community was formed in mainland Europe that started in France, Belgium and Holland and in 2007 moved into the German market.

Also in 2007 a new community was started in South Africa again bringing a critical mass of buyers and suppliers together to establish a trading community.