I hope you have had a well-earned rest and your batteries have now been fully re-charged and you are rearing to go.
3 simple questions to ask oneself and to discuss with your management team/business partners.
- Where are we and how did we get here?
- Where are we heading, and do we want to go there? If not, then where?
- What must we do to get this right and to build our capacity?
One great tool in the CfDE toolbox which can help in this process is the ME budget. The ME budget is a spreadsheet that looks at the amount of energy (ME) needed to produce said amount of kgMS for the season. It will convert the figure back to dry matter then it will calculate if the farm supplies enough pasture and feed to produce the kgMS.
The spreadsheet will also check to see if the diet offered to your cows is balanced.
Dry matter and ME requirements
It will also calculate important utilisation figures.
Then using the farm working expenses and the $/kgMS for the season it will calculate the net profit.
Financials
One of the grand things about this budget is that you can run different scenario’s and see what falls out of the bottom.
- Running less cows.
- Importing less feed verse more.
- Regrassing more and growing more pasture.
- Using different $/kgMS.
Scenario
Instead of running 850 cows as above you run 825 cows aiming for the same production of 482kgMS/cow/day and using the same milk price of $7.50/kgMS.
Conclusion
You will see that if you compare the two financial tables above that your total FWE have dropped from $4.37/kgMS to $4.21/kgMS and your net income EBITD has increased from $3.13/kgMS to $3.29/kgMS.
In this scenario it is profitable to drop cow numbers.
For more information or you would like to crunch some figures please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Centre for Dairy Excellence
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