Casually walking into the bank one day a few years ago, I bumped into a dairyman I have known since 2006. We caught up about our kids and life. Then he described a situation he was in that is a common one I find in my consulting work with dairies.

It’s the end of harvest. It’s time to clean up or make repairs to your equipment to get it ready for next year. It’s also a time to think about how you’ve performed from an operational standpoint. But, as you have more downtime over the coming months, it’s also an opportunity to take your management skills to the next level.

The cost to operate a dairy business is a critical component associated with generating profit. Profits are determined by quantity and quality of output, the prices received for output and capital invested along with the costs to produce output.

I’ve pulled a few books off my library shelves to encourage you to start having more open money conversations. Here are several great titles:

Now that the effects of the pandemic are largely behind us, dairy operators find themselves in an interesting situation. Markets are usually driven by either supply or demand, but right now, they’re being driven by both, and that has implications on how you navigate dairy and commodity prices.

Interested in selling your milk for $50 per hundredweight (cwt)? Well, it takes about 12 pounds of milk to make a gallon of ice cream, and selling the ice cream for $6 per gallon nets out a price of about $50 per cwt. Better yet, what if you sell it by the 4-ounce scoop for $2.50 per scoop? Are you ready to sign up?

When it comes to dairy production measures like milk production per cow, age of first calving and pregnancy rates, these are biological measures we think about every day.