Employing a planning process is a good step for beginning and established farms. If you are just starting your business, performing a strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis on your operation is a great place to start.
Business planners use SWOT analysis as a risk management tool for business operations on a daily basis. If you are established and already have plans in place, you may want to review your plans or use SWOT to give you tools to determine when or if you want to make changes in your operation. Sufficient records must be kept, aiding in diagnosing successes and failures. Obviously, everyone wants to be rewarded from success; but, more importantly, producers need to have a good mechanism for identifying problems when they occur in an operation.
I would like to highlight the importance of developing the feed and forage plan. Being a reproductive physiologist, I will often argue with some of my counterparts that reproduction is the single-most important aspect in a cow-calf operation. However, my nutrition-minded friends are quick to remind me, without proper nutrition, cows do not get rebred.
A forage, feed and facilities plan is arguably the most important tool you can discuss and formulate on your operation. Nutrition is the single-most important driver of reproduction on a beef cattle operation, and the forage, feed and facilities plan coordinates the cow production cycle with available feedstuffs and facilities to ensure delivery of those feedstuffs (fencing, feedbunks, hay feeders, water tanks, etc.).
Establishing the forage, feed and facilities plan allows producers to schedule supplement, mineral, fertilizer and herbicide purchases depending on need. More importantly, producers use growth curves of available forages to determine when forage availability works best with the production cycle (compare the production cycle plan and the forage and feed plan).
Cattle producers are really forage farmers who use cattle to harvest their crops and produce a high-quality product. Implementation of a controlled breeding season allows you to target your high-quality grazing for certain times within the production cycle. For example, producers would want to offer the highest-quality grazing and supplement to the 2-year-old cow that is lactating, growing and trying to get rebred. In the continuous system, these cattle are unable to be targeted for increased nutrition as they are spread out across the entire year.
