Management

If you are looking for ways to improve your bottom line and develop a road map for your future, creating a business plan may be the right move for you. Business planning is essential for all successful businesses, including dairy operations.

With unemployment rates below 5% again, labor shortages are prominent. In addition to scarce numbers of candidates, the need to find and retain good employees is further threatened by turnover, injuries, poor performance and noncompliance with regulations.

Whether you milk 20 or over 1,000 cows, every dairy farmer experiences weighty issues such as managing tight cash flows amid rising input costs, reaching growth objectives through prudent expansion and wading through complex succession matters for a multigenerational family farm.

What is common sense? Does common sense exist? The idea of common sense is that we all use the same sound judgment when making decisions. In other words, everyone else will do what seems obvious to you without being told or taught what to do.

Sweat equity is a term often used by those in farming to define how established farmers use the payment of a commodity or capital asset to replace some of the cash wages for employees.

A working manager is someone who supervises or at least directs people and manages and works in the operations of the dairy farm or agribusiness. Working manager is a challenging position because the two roles are very different, and that difference is rarely truly appreciated and accounted for.