Since the initial inception of First4Farming in 2000 the same philosophy has been pursued and has been adopted in each new region in which the company has started.
 
F4F Business Principles

• 
  Open to all. F4F is independent. F4F is simply an IT platform to facilitate business. It provides an industry infrastructure at a shared cost and does not look to provide competitive differentiation for participants. Participants compete in the normal way as now in the course of their business.
• As an independent infrastructure provider, F4F does not directly intermediate itself in the commercial relationship between a participant and its customers – its role is purely an infrastructure provider.
• F4F is independent. F4F is not dominated by either manufacturers or distributor/ merchants. The business is run on a day to day basis by a small team of executive management overseen by an independent Chairman. No industry shareholder has a dominant share - no shareholder has veto rights & all decisions are made by majority vote.
• Critical mass. F4F aims to quickly develop a critical mass of the participants in any of the markets and geographies in which it operates. This ensures that a) the F4F document standard is the only one a business has to integrate with and b) that the efficiencies may be derived from the overall implementation of the solution. The more businesses involved the greater the efficiencies.
• The business is privately owned with a mix of industry shareholders and individual shareholders all of whom have a common objective to provide our customers with a robust and complete and technically excellent solution. 

Whilst the philosophy of the company has not changed since inception some valuable lessons have been learned along the way.

These lessons are:

• A clear demonstration of our Independence and neutrality is essential together with confirmation that there is no commercial control by peers or competitors, PLUS a guarantee of confidentiality of all information that passes through F4F
• A demonstration that the Solution we provide provides for everyone in the Supply Chain – from major multinational corporations running major ERP systems to sole traders operating through e-mail and fax and no accounts packages. All are players in the supply chain.  
• No declared barriers to entry – any business is allowed to participate - All players in the chain are given the tools to participate and the option to participate – regardless of size
• A Critical Mass of participants from day one delivers momentum and ensures industry adoption
• In order to establish credibility F4F demonstrates industry knowledge and process and terminology familiarity, financial strength and experience in integrating the systems and processes of businesses in agriculture.