Performing Department
Agri Economics, Sociology & Education
Non Technical Summary
This project will develop and implement simple and extremely low cost data entry methods accessible on multiple platforms (hard copy forms, mobile, and web) and provide access to users to comparative analysis of essential data streams characterizing operations and the economic environment in which dairy farms operate. Second, the project will develop automated, background capacity to compute current farm-level, economic, performance-oriented benchmarks based on economic peer farm identification drawn from state-of-the-art methods and management decision support metrics (MDSMs) such as profitability, productivity, and efficiency. The project will focus on dairy and related crops (forages, corn and soybean), farm-wide as well as enterprise data and metrics, however also provide capacity to analyze specific aspects such as feed and nutrient management. The project will contribute by advancing data gathering and conducting research on cost of production, farm profitability factors, and farm policy (FBMB obj#2), and improve producer's ability to manage risk emanating from price volatility (FBMB obj#7).
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The goal of the project is to establish an economic sciencebased, state-of-the-art capacity that delivers management decision support metrics (MDSMs) to dairy producers. To ensure this delivery, the project will engage producers, consultants, and associations to develop new capacity that is convenient and timely for producers to access, is drawn from contemporary farm-specific data as well as conditioned by contemporary market data that characterizing the economic environment and conditions faced by the farm manager, and is disseminated through a viral mechanism initiated by the capacity's intrinsic value and supported by convenience of access, clearly apparent benefits of use, and producer-oriented training. Specific objectives of this proposal include: 1) implement new capacity to collect new data streams to support MDSMs for U.S. dairy farms and feed that data into the existing National Center for Farm Management at the University of Minnesota (FBMB obj#1), 2) advance data gathering and conduct research on cost of production, farm profitability factors, and farm policy (FBMB obj#2), and 3) improve dairy producer's ability to manage risk emanating from price volatility (FBMB obj#7).
Project Methods
An essential aspect of management is the identification of opportunities for improving performance. State-of-the-art methods to serve this goal have evolved to go beyond simple comparison to averages across similar sized operations. Excelling in performance can not logically follow from comparison to averages. Instead, current methods for benchmarking identify economic peer operations as the goal for emulation. These economic peers are identified through methods that follow from the simple logic that performance follows from the integrated consideration of processes, economic environment, and opportunities to reduce particular inputs while expanding productivity of limited resources. Data collection will be accessible via hard copy form, web-based forms and smartphone applications that directly feed into a web-based database (obj #2) and this project database will be linked with the NCFM database at University of Minnesota (obj#1). To aid producers, better data analysis and reporting by a combined smartphone app and web based database has the potential to enhance a producers understanding of their specific feed costs, current market environment, and nutrient management strategies. The multiple platform (smartphone & web database) approach is critical to maximize producer engagement.