By Roland P. Freund
Area Farm
Management Agent
Step 3. Which plays can our team
use? Examining Enterprise
Alternatives.
When specific goals and ob
jectives have been established (we
did that in the last edition of this
series), then we need to look at the
options available to us in order to
generate the production and in
come to achieve those objectives.
A football team that sets out to
have a winning season will prepare
many different plays and
strategies to equip itself to achieve
that goal. There are some plays
that may never be used, but the
coach evaluates them and keeps
them in mind - just in case.
In the farming game there is
often need for several different
“enterprise teams”, and we have
to be very careful to evaluate the
role of each enterprise, as well as
the performance of each player, in
achieving the winning result. When
on player consistently fumbles the
3ROOT®brand trimethacarb insecticide isn’t
just the same old rootworm control wrapped up
in a different package
For one thing, BROOT brand is a carbamate,
a different class of insecticide than the one you’ve
most likely been using.
That’s important because researchers have
As with any agricultural chemical, always follow instructions on the label BROOT® is a registered trademark of Union Carbide Agricultural Products
Company, Inc Copyright 1986 Union Carbide Agricultural Products Company, Inc 1
The Basics Of Management
Six Steps To Establish Control Of Farm Business
ball, or runs in the wrong direction,
we can’t win if we keep giving him
the ball. We have to prepare a
game plan for each “enterprise
team”.
Our livestock plan might list as a
specific objective maximum
profit from farm-raised feed, and
earn a good return to the farm
family’s labor. The players on this
team are the enterprises - cows,
heifers, stpers, hogs. The per
formance of each can be measured
with budgets, plugging in your own
farm records. If your budgets show
that steers regularly loose profit
yardage that was gained by the
cows, then you better plan to keep
those steers “on the bench.”
In this process, we are com
paring enterprises - to see which of
them best contributes to the needs
and profits of the whole farm. It is
not necessary to use complete
budgets which attempt to allocate
every last cent of “fixed cost”. A
simpler tool is to take income (or
product value for commodities
produced on the farm and fed to
Broot 15GX
BroofA different class of com soil insecticide.
other enterprises) and deduct all
variable costs to give the “en
terprise gross profit margin.”
Select those enterprises which
return the most gross margin, yet
can be maintained with your
resources and abilities. For more
detail of such budgets, see
Financial Management for the
family farm Vol. 85, No. 10 - Cash
Flow as a Tool of Financial
Management, available at your
county Penn State Extension
Office.
To complete the livestock plan,
we should have such helpful tools
as a three-to-five-year production
plan, breeding/stocking schedule,
feeding program, and finally, a
facilities/equipment plan. This is
considered last because it is only
when we have put. together a
profitable livestock scheme that
we need to invest in buddings and
equipment to maintain that
profitable livestock program. We
should not build facilities first, and
then try to develop a business to
pay for what thought we wanted.
found that prolonged use of one class of insecti
cide may cause decreased effectiveness against
rootworms.
For another thing, BROOT brand trimetha
carb is the only insecticide in its class that doesn’t
carry a restricted use label.
And you already know why that’s important
riwiw
I«MMt
Lancaster Faming Saturday, Jatmary 3,1M7-D1
We should play our cropping
plan in much the same way. It’s
objective might be maximising
profit from sales, or it might be
producing low-cost, high-quality
feed for the livestock enterprises.
All possible crops and double-crop
combinations should be budgeted,
using current data. In all budgets it
is very important that we be
conservative in anticipation of
yields and prices; all of us know of
the risks and uncertainties of
climatic and market conditions.
After selecting those crops that
appear most profitable, plug them
into a plan which includes these
features:
Fertility - efficient use of
nutrients from manures and
legumes
Weed control
Rotation plan, combining the
above
Conservation - drainage, tillage,
erosion control
Cropping plan by individual field
Storage alternatives
Equipment needs (not wants)
Without a marketing plan, a
farm is like a football squad
without a kicking team • it can’t
hope to maintain profit-winning
scores. To train this hot-shot
marketing kicker, the manager
needs to:
Know local markets, prices,
commissions, drying costs etc.
Understand government
programs, their restrictions,
signups etc.
Stay up-dated on national
markets, USDA reports etc.
Consider contract marketing
Know hedging or futures options
- opportunities for the prudent.
Just as with game plans, there is
no one best marketing strategy. No
marketing plan will always hit the
tops of markets. The careful
manager, who knows his costs and
his desired profit margin, will keep
himself informed. He’ll take a
profitable price for part of his
production when it is guaranteed,
but he had best not be too greedy
this can bring disaster.
The marketing plan is the
continuous monitor which provides
signals that indicate when some
adjustment should be made in
livestock or crop-production plans
to take advantage of opportunities
for profit. This monitor will help
identify enterprises that cannot
put points on the board, and send
those players to the showers.
A football coach prepares his
teams for every forseeable
situation. The farm manager
prepares his plays on paper, so
that when conditions change he
can re-evaluate the circumstances
and develop new strategies. The
next section of this series will
discuss how the farm manager
uses this information to put
together a farm game plan. All this
takes some management time, but
it can be far less costly than ex
perimenting with poured concrete,
steel, equipment, and $lOO,OOO
investments.
Wisconsin Scientists
May Improve
Domestic Potatoes
With Wild Genes
MADISON, Wise. - Domestic
potatoes are good, but they could
pick up a few positive qualities
from their wild relatives, ac
cording University of Wisconsin
experts.
Wild potatoes often have
desirable traits such as resistance
to frost, drought and disease, but
they can’t readily share these with
their domestic cousins.
Plant scientists at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison have found
special pollen in wild potatoes that
may help transfer their desirable
traits to domestic potatoes.
Georgia Yerk, a graduate student
in plant breeding and genetics, and
geneticist Stanley Peloqum are
using intermediary potatoes to
capture and preserve genetic
traits found in wild potatoes.
“We are now in a position to tap
the storehouse of genes present in
wild species and to evaluate their
contributions on a single plant
level,” Yerk says.
Yerk is experimenting with wild
potatoes from Argentina, Bolivia,
Chile and Peru. Her work faces
two serious obstacles, though. Wild
potatoes don’t grow tubers in
Wisconsin because of differences
in day length. And traits can’t be
directly transferred from wild
potatoes to domestic species
because wild potatoes have two
sets of chromosomes, a charac
teristic known as diploidy, and