First Pioneer Farm Credit held their annual Large Dairy Farm Benchmark Program meeting in Burlington on Friday, April 4. About 80 people attended, mostly farmers from northern New England and New York, including many Yankee Farm Credit customers. First Pioneer consultants Bill Zweigbaum, Rick Hermonot and John Lehr ran the meeting.
Also speaking at the meeting was David Galligan, VMD of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Galligan talked about "Growing Your Dairy Economically." He demonstrated many interesting "visual analytics." If you are interested in more information, contact Dr. Galligan (contact info on his web site) as the visual analytics are available on his web site but are password-protected.
A few of the many concepts discussed at the meeting were: paying more attention to liquidity (something we have been encouraging also); improving internal herd growth; and looking at income and expenses on a gross margin basis. The last concept is something that First Pioneer consultants have been talking about for several years now. The idea is to divide expenses into variable expenses (cost of goods sold) and fixed expenses (overhead). If your cost of goods sold is higher than it should be, you might consider getting better before you get bigger. If your fixed costs are higher than they should be, then expansion might be a viable strategy.
Marie Guay and I attended the meeting from Yankee staff.
