your profit per acre

Irishfarmer

Well-Known Member
What are your profit margins per acre in farming whether be dairy tillage beef sheep. Are you pleased with your enterprise or considering switching it. Alot getting into dairy
 
What are your profit margins per acre in farming whether be dairy tillage beef sheep. Are you pleased with your enterprise or considering switching it. Alot getting into dairy

Beef = the SFP and a few €'s if you're lucky. will the Yanks pay a premium for grass based beef now that the market looks like re-opening. my guess is any premium will end up in Larry Goodmans pocket.
 
Larry goodman is supposed to be buying alot of angus & hereford calves this weather. Being reared by farmers & then back to him. What will end up of that?! Lads like him running the beef industry take every bit of profit they can get.
 
Larry goodman is supposed to be buying alot of angus & hereford calves this weather. Being reared by farmers & then back to him. What will end up of that?! Lads like him running the beef industry take every bit of profit they can get.

Isn't that the general idea of running a business? :confused:
 
Get hold of the benchmarking results for the enterprises your interested in, these give a good indication of what is being achieved and what can be achieved. Not motivational reading I'm afraid by large.
 
Get hold of the benchmarking results for the enterprises your interested in, these give a good indication of what is being achieved and what can be achieved. Not motivational reading I'm afraid by large.

its eye opening alright.

local man here down scaling, he is going from about thirty cows to 8 or ten, recons its the least he needs to get sfp,

profit here? not by benchmarking figures anyway, sheep stand better than cows, but we know the big issues holding us back-conacre
 
Isn't that the general idea of running a business? :confused:

Exactly, are they margins in processing milk, any more or less, than in the beef business? You don't hear dairy farmers complain as much as beef farmers.
At a guess id say the beef factories are operating on a margin of around 5% to 7%.
 
At a guess id say the beef factories are operating on a margin of around 5% to 7%.[/quote]

Quote from Journal supplement this week, Larry Goodmans ABP made a series of investments over the past 3 years for an estimated E100 million. The same Goodman who had debts of nearly E700 million in the early 90's.
I have been a beef farmer through these decades and have trouble earning a living wage, whilst he can turn a multi million debt to a multi million empire, and you think he is giving farmers a fair deal....I think the evidence confirms otherwise, that is not a guess.
 
At a guess id say the beef factories are operating on a margin of around 5% to 7%.

Quote from Journal supplement this week, Larry Goodmans ABP made a series of investments over the past 3 years for an estimated E100 million. The same Goodman who had debts of nearly E700 million in the early 90's.
I have been a beef farmer through these decades and have trouble earning a living wage, whilst he can turn a multi million debt to a multi million empire, and you think he is giving farmers a fair deal....I think the evidence confirms otherwise, that is not a guess.[/QUOTE]

If it was that easy wouldn't everyone be at it though. Larry Goodman, or Kepak, or anyone else, doesn't put a gun to anyone's head to go out and give crazy money for weanlings. The notion of giving a "fair" price has nothing to do with running a multi-million euro business. What other business in the agri sector pays a fair price? They all pay a price that reflects the market and leaves them with an acceptable margin, just like any other industry. When did a beef farmer ever say "I'll take a few pound less for those cattle so the next man can turn a few quid on them", or "sure the tillage man is under pressure this year, I'll offer him a few quid extra for his grain". It's always the easy target to blame the man who's buying your produce, which you can't control, instead of focusing on the cost of production, which you can. I remember a friend of mine telling me years ago, the first week he started studying economics in Trinity they got a test from a lecturer. He wrote on the board "A fair day's work for a fair day's pay - Discuss". The class wrote out their answers and they all failed. He simply said when he had finished handing out the results "A fair day's work for a fair day's pay is a question of morality, it has absolutely nothing to do with economics"
 
At a guess id say the beef factories are operating on a margin of around 5% to 7%.

Quote from Journal supplement this week, Larry Goodmans ABP made a series of investments over the past 3 years for an estimated E100 million. The same Goodman who had debts of nearly E700 million in the early 90's.
I have been a beef farmer through these decades and have trouble earning a living wage, whilst he can turn a multi million debt to a multi million empire, and you think he is giving farmers a fair deal....I think the evidence confirms otherwise, that is not a guess.[/QUOTE]

Im not saying that, what i was asking is this, is there a greater margin made by beef processors than milk processors? We have been feeding cattle for a long time too and in the past we killed cattle with aibp, we always got paid. Ive been going to meetings and conferences over the years, i was involved in a group set up to bring discussion/purchasing groups together, my eyes were opened to the profits that many farmers thought everybody else was making off them. Its tough for all imo, scale is what creates profit in the processing business. Its the chance/opportunity to create wealth that will encourage business to grow or to come here from other countries and set up in the first place. I see your point and agree about one man or business having so much control, but how can we legislate to stop this from happening while at the same time encourage others grow?
 
The reason so many have failed to make a go of beef processing is that the existing players have it sowed up and push out new entrants whatever way they can.

A monoply exists and that means no competition and a distorted market.


There is money to be made but only if your name is larry.
 
See someone above saying people pay too much for weanlings, well to be honest suckler farmers selling weanling are already losing money so ir you think weanlings are going to get any cheaper then you may go abroad to source them because there will be a lot more suckler producers here calling it a day due to lack of profit and you can go on about efficiency but there is only so far you can go that road without cutting health and safe farming.

The problem with cattle production in this country have never been the faulth of farmers but the factories for soft selling and the Supermarkets having total lack of respect for the primary producer.
 
factory margin is generally accepted to be something just over 2%. its a volume business. many companies are not in too healthy a position currently in Ireland and the effects of the strong beef price coupled with jockying for position in Britain will soon be evident.
 
There would have been a severe cut back in suckler numbers I believe only for the Genomics scheme and BTAP as well.

Next years calving numbers will be interesting, this years are distorted due to breeding and cashflow problems due to the terrible spring in 2013.
 
would 200 per acre per year be about average for a suckler enterprise
 
i think the most realistic profit indicators are in the national farm survey which is carried out by teagasc for the eu, the farmer gives them all his details on income and expenditure and they go away and process all the information, every type of farming is done and a broad spectrum of farms (good and bad ) are chosen and at the end of the year a profit monitor is given to each participant telling them how they rate against other anonymous farms , i,ve been doing it for years now and i find it the most useful piece of paper that comes in the post and would pay somebody to do it for me if i was dropped from the list
 
Similarly our discussion group profit monitor meeting was the most useful two hours of my farming year, everyone in the group contrasted eachothers figures, you could see a clear trend of the farmers who were putting in the effort, and the ones who used each consecutive profit monitor to zone in on areas they could improve year on year. Quite afew different dairy enterprises in our discussion group also, from compact calving spring systems to mostly autumn calving high input/output. Whereas most systems made a decent profit in 2013 it will be interesting to see how things like low milk prices impact on the various systems in the future.

On myown PM 2 or 3 areas of clear overspends were identified , so the target is to correct them this year. Other specific items like being less tolerance of poor performers, better heat detection, and improved milk quality should hopefully give me noticeable improvements in next years PM.

On the threat title question ha, everyone is giving politicians answers ha, with the profit per area all I'll say is despite 2013 being a good year, myown profit per area isn't where it could and should be, but its all work in progress, hopefully decent inroads will be made in 2014!
 
in our discussion group we made a decision not to talk in detail about each others profit monitors as we felt it would turn into a my dick is bigger than yours competition aqnd some members might have been put off going to meetings because of this, it was also felt that people might be tempted to manipulate the figures a bit to boost their margin in dairy or beef enterprises, this is not in line with dr jacks advice but it works for our gang anyway
 
That didn't happen at all with us, well at least not during the meeting ha! We did have a rule that what gets discussed in the meeting remains between us, obviously would be bad to go telling everyone down the pub that whoevers profit monitor figures are rubbish and he should get outa cows etc!

The PM meeting was only for people who had actually completed their PM. There was no real pressure on any of the other members who decided not to do it. On the manipulating figures, why on earth you'd bother I don't know. In my group anyways a large number of us are in liquid milk and would be coming from all year around calving backgrounds, and we largely know there is room for most of us improve by simplifying our systems, it just doesnt make since for us to be squabbling among ourselves trying to outdo eachothers with manipulated figures, when we know its the likes of the top 10% on the national figures that we need to be looking at and striving to achieve them!
 
god tim it must be the only meeting ever held that lads came out of and never mentioned it again:D as for not exaggerating the figures sure nobody grows less than 3 ton of barley or has cows giving less than 600 ltrs,i was surprised last yr when our advisor said the national average yield is 400 ltrs i don,t know where he got the figure from but it must be correct
 
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