Dairy Gauge is a financial decision tool designed to help dairy farmers better understand the financial health of their operations. The program is being offered to dairy producers in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. In other to participate, producers will need their income and expense information, annual milk marketing summary, a current balance sheet, a herd inventory, and their schedule F. These items will be used to generate a real-time financial report for the operation. This report will include income and expense information on a per cow, and per cwt, basis but will also include multiple financial benchmark and ratio calculations for the farm.
While all individual information is kept confidential, summary information from all participating operations is also made available. This allows dairy farmers to compare their benchmarks to the average of other operations in the program and identify areas of strength and weakness. Efforts are ongoing to increase the number of dairies participating from each state and to incorporate beef-on-dairy into the Dairy Gauge program. A link to the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture’s Dairy Gauge website which includes more information about the program, benchmarks, and information on how to join can be found here: https://utdairy.tennessee.edu/dairy-gauge-program/
