What is potential worth? When you think about potential, it’s amazing how valuable we seem to believe it is. For example, think about many of the purchases and investments you’ve made. It’s easy to calculate how much an investment has returned in the past and how much it’s yielding in the present. But one of the real reasons you choose to take on the risk of a purchase or an investment is due to the potential gains or savings it will deliver in the future. I guess technically we call that a “forecast,” but essentially we’re talking about potential.

“Take away my factories and I’ll build a new and better factory. But take away my people, and grass will grow on the factory floor.”—Andrew Carnegie Andrew Carnegie was no bleeding heart, social humanitarian do-gooder, but rather a Capitalist with a capital ‘C’ – a man whose fortune, in today’s dollars, would stir envy in the heart of Bill Gates. Yet the immigrant industrialist was simply acknowledging that in his steel business – just as in your dairy business – people mean profit. Your organization’s ability to attract, retain and make productive the best talent available has a direct impact on your ability to grow, make money and sustain a competitive advantage.

The cost of financial statements and tax returns is often seen as an annoying expense to meet an outside party’s requirements. However, the information contained in these documents can easily be used to calculate key ratios that can be valuable management tools when understood and used to make operating decisions. Ratios allow a dairy owner to quickly understand whether the dairy is making money and where it stands compared to prior years and industry benchmarks.

I have been asked twice in the last five years, “How do I turn my dairy around? How can I resurrect my farm from near death to a vibrant dairy that people look at and admire?” What I did was break down these different areas of concern into several different categories.

One of the most common injuries in the workplace is an eye injury. It is estimated that over 2,000 people in the U.S. injure their eyes at work each day. The majority of these injuries result from small particles or slivers impacting or abrading the eye (See http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/eye/). Of these injuries, 90 percent could have been reduced in severity or avoided altogether through the use of proper eye protection (Also see http://www.preventblindness.org/safety/worksafe.html).

A future characterized by volatility, wild price swings and economic uncertainty is vividly painted in an eye-opening yet prescriptive white paper written by Scott Stewart, president and CEO of Stewart-Peterson Inc. “My objective is to open readers’ minds to the possibilities of what can occur in the decade or more ahead,” writes the 30-year veteran of commodity marketing, whose consulting firm helps grain, dairy and livestock farms manage market opportunities and risks. “The global events we are seeing now and will see ahead have impact right down to the rural community and farm level. More importantly, the way in which individual farmers respond to these events will have incredible impact on our entire nation and the health of our rural communities.”

Minnesota Milk Producers Association is offering a webinar to its producer and associate members. “Defining an Orientation Program for New Employees” is planned for March 8 from 12:30-1:30 p.m. CST. It will be led by Felix Soriano, APN Consulting, LLC.

How much is my milk worth? It depends on who you ask. A milk producer will answer based on the incurred costs of producing the milk, but a buyer of milk, such as a milk plant, will answer based on the value of what the milk goes into. End-product pricing of milk, back tracking from the value of finished products down to a milk value, underlies both the FMMO and California minimum prices. Though modified and tweaked to meet policy goals and practicality, the formulas are straightforward: Product price less a manufacturing cost times the pounds of product from a hundred pounds of milk.