As we are now in the third quarter of 2025, we are looking ahead to the next year with lower milk prices in the forecast. And while high beef prices have been the saving grace for many dairy farms, we cannot ignore that it’s time to once again tighten our management belts and find ways to increase cash flow while decreasing our cost of production. Here are three tips to get started today:
Opportunity #1: Maximize Each Employee
A dairy I visited recently was concerned about finding a replacement for an employee who had left. They were ready to rush to fill the open position and put a new person into the old role. But when I spent time observing the daily workflow of the current team, what I found was a lot of wasted time. Mornings started with long chit-chat sessions. As employees crossed paths during the day, it turned into standing around instead of moving onto the next task. By re-assigning tasks and re-organizing their day, we found that we actually did not need to hire another full-time employee at all. We also set time budgets for each task. That included cutting down the morning coffee conversation from two hours to 10 minutes.
Opportunity #2: Tune Up Your Teams
The next step to maximizing the potential of each team member is to fine-tune their skills. This can include training them to learn a new task, such as breeding. What is often overlooked is retraining. I’ve seen dairies suffering from low repro, only to discover that protocols had drifted or bad habits developed. Simply taking the time to train and retrain can keep costly mistakes at bay.
Opportunity #3: Understand Your Expenses, Then Look to Cut Them
Another main focus right now is going through cash flows with dairy farms to get an accurate picture of where they are financially. It starts with going through the numbers, and next it is looking hard at each line item of expenses and evaluating where costs could be reduced. The area with the most potential to save money is the same one that is the largest expense: feed. Analyze the ration and extra ingredients that might have been added in the past to fix a problem but are no longer needed. Get good quality forages up now and purchase additional carryover if you can. I’ve visited a few dairies lately that didn’t notice they were running short on feed before the new crop came in.
Ep. 266: 3 Biggest Challenges Dairy Farmers are Facing Right Now:
open.spotify.com/episode/4Y5bEanjohhb86WaGyFJSj?si=gh2K_7A_QhuMPJM-9Wr34A
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Data: The New Dairy Gold
