Presentations from the Improving profitability and resilience of grazing businesses in Queensland project

The following presentations were given to different audiences throughout the life of the Improving profitability and resilience of grazing businesses in Queensland project to help explain and summarise project results and key messages.

They include explanations of the spreadsheet tools and how to use them.

The presentations cover:

• Understanding farm management economics
• Improving the profitability and resilience of grazing businesses
• Assessing options for drought response
• Assessing options for drought recovery

Understanding farm management economics

The Understanding farm management economics recorded presentation explains the methods and terminology used in the farm management economic analyses conducted as part of this project.

The presentation gives an overview of the basic economic principles applied to decision making on beef and sheep grazing properties.

The entire presentation is 52 minutes long; however, it has been broken down into chapters for people seeking specific information.

Improving the profitability and resilience of grazing businesses

This series of recorded presentations explain and summarise the results and key messages from the project. These include:

1. Evaluating the consequences of alternative management strategies for beef enterprises in northern Australia (presentation to the Australian Association of Animal Sciences 2020)
2. Improving profitability and resilience of livestock enterprises in western and northern Queensland (presentation as part of the E-Beef webinar series 2020)
3. Part 1 – Improving the performance of beef production systems in northern Australia (BEEF week and BeefConnect 2018)
4. Part 2 – Low cost strategies to build the resilience of beef production systems in northern Australia (BeefConnect webinar 2018)
5. Part 3 – Improving beef business performance with high quality forages (BEEF week and BeefConnect 2018)
6. What is the profitability and financial risk of getting into goats? (presentation delivered as part of the MLA Goat Roadshow 2021)

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Assessing options for drought response

Questions that arise when responding to drought include:

• Do I sell, agist, feed or take a chance on rain?
• How are these options compared?
• If I sell, what do I sell first, and why?
• Does my response now decide my recovery strategy when it rains?

These questions were addressed in a series of 7 recorded presentations that demonstrate how to use the spreadsheet tools developed as part of the project to compare options when responding to drought or disaster.

The spreadsheets, containing the example figures in the presentations, can be downloaded from: Spreadsheet tools for tactical, short-term decision making in response to and recovery from drought and disaster.

The options for drought response presentations include:

1. Introduction and overview
2. Situation analysis
3. Mortality risk and early weaning
4. Sell, feed or agist PTIC cows
5. Send sale steers on agistment or sell early
6. Assessing forced sales from within cow, heifer and steer groups – the example used is selling extra steers and freeing up space for the PTIC cows
7. Impact of the response strategy on recovery

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Assessing options for drought recovery

When recovering from drought the key focus is usually on returning the beef business to its usual cash-flow and profitability as quickly as possible.

This involves identifying the most efficient way of rebuilding the herd structure for optimum profit and resilience.

Although each recovery period is different, the same framework can be applied to assess the relative merit of alternative recovery strategies. Such strategies can include:

• rebuilding the livestock numbers using natural increase alone (retained progeny)
• purchase of cows (and calves) to rebuild the herd faster
• taking cattle on agistment
• purchasing groups of steers, heifers or cows and calves as turnover stock
• re-purchasing the components of the herd that were sold to rebuild numbers to the long-term herd structure; or a combination of all of the above.

In the next 2 presentations, these options are examined along with demonstrations on how to use the spreadsheet tools to compare these strategies.

The drought recovery presentations include:

8. Options for recovery
9. Incorporating climate variability in the analysis of response and recovery strategies

The spreadsheets, containing the example figures, can be downloaded from: Spreadsheet tools for tactical, short-term decision making in response to and recovery from drought and disaster.

The more complex spreadsheets for assessing options over longer time-frames are available on request from the project leader.

The project was funded by the Queensland Government’s Drought and Climate Adaptation Program (2017-2021).

For more information about the project please contact the project leader—Dr Maree Bowen, DPI Rockhampton at maree.bowen@dpi.qld.gov.au.

Additional information