Forget margin per litre, net farm profit is the goal

摘要

There has, rightly, been a lot of attention in the farming press recently on how to respond to the falling milk price. This has too often been focused on single factor solutions (cutting costs or increasing milk from grazed grass) and increasing margins. I have even heard completely fatuous arguments as to whether margin per litre is more important than margin per cow. The problem is that each dairy farm business is a unique combination of many interacting factors and you can be making a perfectly acceptable margin while going bust.