Numbers may be on your mind as tax time prompts a reconciliation of the last 12 months.
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Good or bad, numbers can provide an opportunity to check how your red meat enterprise has really performed in the last financial year.
Just as you collate all your information for tax time, you can also develop some even more useful benchmarks using numbers for your beef or lamb production.
And while it is the bottom line that ultimately counts, there are many measures of production and efficiency that all act together to produce that profit number.
There are many different paths to performance for any producer.
That’s why calculating the benchmarks that mark your own path is what matters most.
By understanding your own milestones you can track how you improve from year to year, and where change occurs.
You can identify issues that reduce return, or offer the opportunity for further improvement.
You can calculate how many kilograms of beef or lamb live-weight you grew per ha for the year, what that cost you per kilo, and contrast this with the income achieved from sales net of livestock purchases.
This margin between real cost and return identifies the fundamental sum where profit begins.
Your calving or lambing percentage, how long it took to achieve the weight at sale and how many DSE’s were required to achieve this, all help identify the biological efficiency that underpins your bottom line.
These numbers are not taxing, they yield a dividend.
This return could be as straightforward as identifying opportunity to improve reproductive performance in the herd or flock, monitoring cow or ewe condition more pointedly and reallocating feed resources to manage it more actively.
It may come in realising that it took too long to get to sale, cost too much pasture feed and put too much pressure on limited feed resources at critical periods of the year.
Different targets or different inputs may be required.
Or it may be that the margin between cost of production and return from sale was just too slim.
Numbers can make us think.
And useful numbers are everywhere, because cost of production is the accumulation of just so many expenses with so many benefits. Like fertiliser.
The cost of fertiliser is part of many red meat businesses, but making sure that cost is effective in producing kilograms per hectare is part of good business.
Soil tests provide numbers that can guide the fertiliser expense and benefit. But only if they get taken.
In one example soil tests from 70 paddocks all receiving phosphorus fertiliser revealed 54 per cent exceeded the level of phosphorus beyond which no growth response would be expected.
Maintenance at the critical level is appropriate, but 28 per cent were at least one and a half times that target and 23 per cent were at least twice that target.
Wasted cost for no return, perhaps for years, is the same inefficiency as too little for too long.
A simple soil test links cost, production and return as an example of powerful benchmarks in action.
Numbers can be keys to profit, not just taxing tasks.