I am not talking about what you keep, I am talking about what you generate for your farm. Your impact should be at least $1000 a day. This is the one question you should ask yourself before you make any decision. Will this help me make $1000 today? And not just today but everyday going forward.
If $1000 a day sounds ambitious or even extreme, that’s ok.
The reality is, the farms that have found their sweet spot are stroking this without a sweat. There is no reason for you to worry about making small tweaks or trying to cut costs until turning $1000 a day.
Here are some examples of what $1000 a day could look like.
- 50 cows @100lbs per day on $20 milk
- 65 Organic cows @ 40lbs per day on $40 milk
- 85cows @ 65 lbs on $19 milk
So it’s no wonder that small, average farms struggle- there just isn’t enough income.
These are just a few examples for milk production. You can plug in steers, crops, custom work, farm stands or a combination of these and you still need X amount of product at X amount of price to get to $1000 a day.
If there is more than one of you- say you are farming with your brother and Dad- you should push this number to $3000 a day. $1000 for each operator. However many number of “operators” there are, their impact should be measured by at least $1000 a day. If someone isn’t making that kind of an impact they should probably punch the clock and be paid like an employee for their time.
Your time is worthless
I don’t want you to misconstrue $1000 a day as a measurement of labor. It’s easy to get caught up in 1 million lbs of milk per full time person or some other silly metric. This isn’t about that. You can absolutely have some labor in addition to yourself. I don’t even want to give you a limit on having labor because every farm runs better with some staff and $1000 a day/operator is all about performance.
The only things that matter are the results you get. Milk in the tank and dollars in the milk check are how valuable you are, how long it took you to get it there doesn’t matter.
Top performance is not about cutting costs
You can’t save your way to $1000 a day either. Joel Salatin has an excellent article about improving your Business Trajectory in a recent Stockman Grass Farmer. In order to save first you have to make. Way, way too many underperforming people will say something like this “well I didn’t spend X.” or ” And I didn’t spend a dime.” Well that is ridiculous.
Do yourself a favor, go ahead and acknowledge all the times and ways you tried to cut some feed costs. And now go ahead and acknowledge (privately of course) how you just never got the same performance after you made the cost cutting move. Cost cutting only works if you don’t sacrifice performance. Cost cutting can’t really start until you break the $1000 day barrier because then you actually have some income to work with. Any number under that you still need to focus on more income.
If you are ready for more income- click the red button to see how we increased our herd size and income without spending a ton of cash.
