Mark and Julie Cressey
Ashburton dairy farmer Mark Cressey is encouraging farmers to be proactive and get their data onto DairyBase – a tool he says has huge potential.
DairyBase is the national dairy farm business database that lets farmers record and report their business performance. Mark and wife Julie, in their third season of 50:50 sharemilking, were one of the first to input data for the 2008/09 season.
They are looking forward to using the benchmarking process to compare their system three operation to others in the Canterbury region. However at the moment they can only do this against farm owners and not 50:50 sharemilkers. Mark, who milks 850 cows, is hoping this situation will change.
“It is important to get benchmarks set in Canterbury because the systems we’re using are unique and so are the outputs we’re getting from the farms,” he says.
“It’s [DairyBase] going to help us far more in the future and I’m really quite keen to get more people on it because it’s going to help everybody. It’s a great tool but we need that mass of people on it,” he says.
Farmers can select benchmarking reports on the basis of a number of physical components for example business type, region or production system. A minimum of 20 farms must be entered for a benchmark group before statistics become available.
Despite the lack of benchmarks DairyBase has proved useful.
The Cresseys participated in the DairyNZ Mark and Measure course in Queenstown this year which taught them to use DairyBase to better analyse what they were already doing.
“We were given some tools at Mark and Measure which allow us to analyse the strength of the economic side of the business,” says Mark.
Mark has used reports from DairyBase to confirm decisions impacting on animal health and labour costs.
“We had been spending too much on animal health in the past so we used DairyBase reports to see if we were in line with what everyone else was doing.”
“We also compared our labour costs on a cents per kilo basis with other farms in the area to see where we could tighten up or get better,” he says.
For Mark, DairyBase is easy to use. Information is collected throughout the year and with the help of a DairyNZ Consulting Officer and his accountant the data is entered into DairyBase.
“It’s all pretty straightforward,” he says.
Meanwhile DairyBase also enables farmers to build an accurate picture of how their business has performed from season to season. Again this is something Mark is looking forward to doing in the future as he collects more data year on year.
“We will use it a lot more than what we are doing now because we can compare season with season and see where we should be heading in terms of expenses and to see where the potential production gains will be,” he says.