Overview

Welcome to Dairy Farm Business Analysis Online.
The reason for undertaking a farm business analysis is to pull together meaningful financial and physical data about a farm that can be used to track that farms performance over time and to provide a solid base to make future decisions.

We rarely know if a business is really operating well without undertaking analysis of the business and linking physical information with financial information. Dairy farms come in all shapes and sizes and what we see doesn’t necessarily tell us how the farm is performing, especially in relation to it’s cash position, profitability and wealth creation.

This course is about linking the ‘getting the big picture settings right’ (eg. how many cows do I milk, how exposed should I be to the purchased feed market and to debt) with the day to day decisions (eg should I feed another kg of grain per cow, should I put on 80 or 100 kg / ha of urea).

DairyBase is a tool that provides a sound analysis of annual performance. However, we want participants to question what is behind the numbers, what are they based on and how are they calculated. We don’t want participants to think that DairyBase is some kind of magic black box. The program is a 7 session fully supported online learning experience, that assists you to be prepared to complete an in-depth farm business analysis. By completing this course, you will feel more confident and on top of your farm business.

At the end of this program, you will be able to:

- identify the types of information required to complete a farm business analysis
- differentiate and complete analysis components of a farm business (cash, profit and wealth) and identify why each view is unique
- use DairyBase to extract information to analyse a farm business
- populate DairyBase with your own farming business figures, leading to detailed analysis of the business
- recognise the law of diminishing marginal returns and how it applies to a unique dairying system 
- calculate the profit maximising level of an input and the required ‘break-even’ output to various inputs
- identify and describe the benefits of risk vs reward for a farming system
- apply accrual accounting concepts to farm business invoices
- calculate cost of production for a farm business
- complete a farm business analysis using existing DairyBase information from two example farms.

Important resources, tools and downloads for this program

Participant Guide
Word  |  For downloading and using electronically during the course, where you can add your own notes
PDF  |  For downloading and printing, so can be used in hard copy and with notes via pen

Course glossary

Select to download the course glossary. Keep it on hand throughout the course as these terms are used frequently.

How to navigate Dairy Farm Business Analysis

In this video you will learn how to digitally navigate this course. This includes:
- Using Google Chrome to access the course
- How to use the tiles to navigate
- Accessing learning content in the course
- How to use the left hand navigation in each piece of learning content
- How to download and access Excel and Word tools throughout the course.
- How to exit each module.