MarginSmart releases version 3.0, adding significant upgrades and features, including the ability to create a duplicate scenario farm to efficiently create an unlimited number of “what-if” scenarios. Users can then see the projected impact of each of those scenarios on their farm’s overall milk margins, cost of production, cash flow and/or profitability.

Whether it be one or more ration changes, ingredient substitution or cost changes, decisions on custom raising youngstock, reviewing milk or feed contract opportunities, changes in operating expenses or “grow or buy” forage decisions, the company says, the new version provides powerful tools to calculate and show the projected future results over the next 12-24 months with current market prices.

It allows users to then toggle back and forth between their real farm and scenario farm to see the difference and make informed financial decisions. One of the aspects of the original program has always been its ability to project feed costs in a combination of the following two ways:

  1. If an ingredient has a high price correlation to corn, soybeans or soybean meal those ingredient prices are updated continually based on the appropriate correlation percentage and changes in the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) market prices, and further adjusted by basis to get to each farm’s exact market prices
  2. For ingredients such as forages, certain commodity protein sources and minerals or additives that do not have a high price correlation to corn or soybean meal (which most feed ingredients do not) MS uses the specific market prices of those ingredients to project feed costs.

A second enhancement to the new version includes the ability to now change the projected cost of all the feed ingredients under option two above on a monthly basis. This allows increased flexibility for the feed cost determination, which ultimately results in even more accurate projections.

For example, MS can now use different costs for forages from different crop years, it can incorporate different costs for projected changes in commodity protein levels, and it can also still allow certain individual ingredients to be priced at the same cost throughout the projection period. PD

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—From MarginSmart news release