Travis Girard, a farm management consultant with MNP, and Dean Klippenstine, also with MNP, join Dan for the second session in the Know Your Numbers benchmarking series, drawing on a database of roughly 1,500 farms and 8.5 million acres across the Prairies. They walk through seven years of regional profitability data and reveal that the production expense gap between top performing farms and average ones is far smaller than most operators assume, just seven dollars an acre. The tension is that most producers judge their own performance against coffee room guesses instead of real comparable data, and the numbers show that spend isn't what separates the best farms, execution is. Producers walk away knowing which number to check first on their own operation and why acreage alone predicts almost nothing about profitability.
Most operators assume the best farms in their region are spending a lot more to get a lot more out of their land. The data says otherwise. Travis Girard, a farm management consultant with MNP, and Dean Klippenstine, also with MNP, return for the second session in the Know Your Numbers benchmarking series, drawing on a database that now covers roughly 1,500 farms and 8.5 million acres across the Prairies.
What's Inside
- Why the production expense gap between top performing farms and average ones came in at just seven dollars an acre, not the twenty five to fifty most people guessed
- Seven years of profitability data across the region, including the one year almost everyone assumes was the worst, and wasn't
- The three things Dean Klippenstine says separate profitable farms from the rest, starting with crop selection
- Why labor, power, and machinery costs come down to mindset more than acres under management
- What bringing your three worst fields up to your own farm's average gross margin could be worth in a year
Resources Mentioned
MNP
MNP Know Your Numbers benchmarking series
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Travis Gerrard
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Dean Klippenstine
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