Our indicators help dairy farms see how they measure up
Dairy farmers can now benchmark themselves against the top five per cent of farms, following an update to our key performance indicators.
After listening to feedback from farmers at our strategic farm meetings and from consultants across the industry, we have updated our KPIs to make sure that they are relevant to all and stretch to the best.
The addition of a new category to the existing bands for the top 25 per cent and industry average farms enable you to see how you compare with other farmers and identify key areas for improvement.
The feedback from farmers and consultants also raised issues around the language and descriptions we used, so we have made changes to the definitions and calculations to make them easier to understand.
The KPIs for part of Farmbench, our online benchmarking tool, that allows farmers to compare themselves anonymously with other farms.
It is vital that dairy farmers are in good shape in order to deal with future challenges. Our updated KPIs enable farmers to review their performance, identify key areas for improvement and make changes, to ensure they are performing well for years to come.
The KPIs are split into six physical measures for each calving system, as well as three financial measures which are applicable to both.
As well as other changes, the ‘income retained’ KPI has now been replaced with the ‘full economic net margin’. In addition, ‘total purchased feed costs’ now excludes forage and youngstock feed.
Launched in 2017, the KPIs form part of our optimal dairy systems programme, which encourages farmers to focus on optimising their calving system – either all year round or blocking calving.
Our KPI’s help you to improve your competitiveness, and having a clear set of measures and targets means that you can benchmark your performance and identify key areas for improvement.
The measures are broken down into two areas:
• Enterprise key performance indicators highlight the six key areas for both all year round and block calving systems, which are crucial to delivering the financial performance required.
• Three key business measures that every business should know, understand and benchmark their performance against.
A full set of definitions along with guidance can be found on our website. Head to ahdb.org.uk/optimal-dairy-systems-key-performance-indicators to find out more.
Mark Topliff is AHDB Dairy lead analyst, farm economics
