Written by Dr. Ashley C. Lovell
The key to the competitiveness of small and medium-sized operations heavily depends on the choice of optimal production system decisions – choices of livestock, crop/forage, and waste management and marketing that are optimal for the herd size.
Through leveraging decades of dairy and beef grazing production systems modeling and analyses, the research team will be able to generate profitability data by size and production system. This database will assist small and medium-sized farmers to enhance their farm/ranch financial performance.
The profitability database will be in a readily usable form for producers and the general public through USDA’s farmer-friendly, web-based Nutrient Tracking Tool (NTT).
To achieve the goal of this project, the research team will use a bio-economic modeling system comprised of two integrated models: the Farm-level Economic Model (FEM) and the Agricultural Policy Environmental eXtender (APEX). The project team will use data disaggregation and clustering methods to determine applicable size groups for each farm type and the corresponding optimal production system configurations for simulation exercises. Thus, various production systems will be simulated for dairy and beef grazing operations of each applicable size to determine the production system that is most profitable for each herd size.
The researchers will combine the data from this project with results from previous studies to make the databases more useful and transformed to fit producers across the nation with similar characteristics and conditions.
To assure that it “fits the producers” the implementation is most important: In the first year of the project, the farm project team will hold special sessions at regularly scheduled producer association meetings to introduce the project to producers and invite their input throughout the project. Two meetings will be held in Texas, one for dairy producers and another for beef cattle and stocker grazing operations. One meeting will be held in Oklahoma in collaboration with the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association.
The project team will also engage with Extension Service before, during and following the meetings. Zooming may be utilized so that potential participants who cannot attend in person can participate in the meeting program. Check with your Extension agent, or send a message to [email protected] or [email protected]
