Mixing the result from book-accounting and the result from the official Swedish recording in a computer to make the dairy farms more profitable

The extension service in milk production in the south of Sweden has develop a new concept which utilises both the records from book-accounting and the records from the official Swedish milk recording. The purpose is to get th e dairy producers to think more in terms of high profit instead of high pro duction. On farm, the dairy farmers uses the computer to make simple calcul ations of for example the cost of roughage and to extract figures from the book-accounting. These figures are sent to a central computer by floppy dis c or E-mail. From this work several cost and income parameters are presente d per kg milk. The presentations are made both in graphs and in tables. A principal component analyse of the result from 68 farms has been done to find the factors behind a good economic result. The principal components wi th significant influence on milk net per kg milk explains 44% of the variat ion in milk net per kg milk. Principal component one is most important and it says that if the labour cost and administrative cost per kg milk is high (positive eigenvectors) then total milk yield, the total number of cows an d milk delivered to the dairy plant are low. The conclusion is that it is d ifficult to earn money in a small dairy herd. Principal component three poi nts out that a high culling rate is going to give a better result of the fe rtility traits (calving interval and number of A.I). The general conclusion must be that the dairy farmers should pay more interest in ordinary busine ss management and be very aware of all types of costs in the dairy producti on, not just feed costs.