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Goal setting is a key part of the planning and controlling functions of management. Each year members of the Dairy Excel team work individually with 10 to 20 dairy farmers on assessing management performance and setting new goals. Usually we help the farmer enter farm information into the FINPACK year-end analysis program. This is a very time consuming task and it reaches less than two percent of the dairy farm managers in the region. To increase our impact we decided to try to identify six to eight easy to compute benchmarks that large numbers of dairy farmers could compute for themselves. We quickly realized the impossibility of establishing a single set of benchmarks for everyone. Since lack of competitiveness is a major issue in the Ohio dairy industry and since our team had a good idea for what it takes to be competitive, we decided to establish benchmarks that represented the levels at which the most competitive firms in the Midwest were already performing. We soon discovered we needed more than a dozen benchmarks to measure the most crucial management areas on a dairy farm. Several times during development our team presented the benchmarks in draft form to lenders, colleagues, and progressive managers in the industry. The discussions with these knowledgeable people helped us refine our benchmarks. The Dairy Excel team published "Dairy Excel's 15 Measures of Dairy Farm Competitiveness" and their accompanying recommendations as a 42-page Extension bulletin. We are sharing the monograph with dairy farmers, industry leaders and peers at workshops and conferences. We have received a very favorable response and many dairy farmers are using our benchmarks to set new goals and increase control of key areas in their businesses. Editor's Note: DairyExcel's 15 Measures of Dairy Farm Competitiveness is available as Extension Bulletin 864. |
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