Ranch economics - Part 3

摘要

Want to know how you can make your ranch more profitable? The answer is benchmarking, a powerful tool designed to help ranchers identify key management areas for increasing their ranch profit. Benchmarking involves comparing your herd's production andeconomic factors against those of benchmark herds to identify your ranch business's strengths and weaknesses. You can then capitalize on the identified strengths while working to remove the weaknesses, one at a time. As each business weakness is removed, total ranch profit tends to go up. Figure 1 presents the results of my benchmark analysis of a Northern Plains beef cowherd. I compared the performance of a study herd with the 2009 averages of 119 Northern Plains Benchmark (ND FBM) herds. Benchmarks are provided on both a per-cow basis and on per-cwt.-of-calf-produced basis.