Production Doesn't Always Mean Profit

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

It can be easy in production agriculture to assume that more production equals more profit. But that all depends on how much you’re having to invest to achieve that productivity. Rancher Glenn Elzinga started with seven cows and and 60 acres in Central Idaho. Decades later he has grown his operation to one that can provide jobs for his grown children by focusing on profit first.

Elzinga… “ We wanna be ultimately profitable, so that meant that we had to hack ways of doing that. And, you know, I, that would be my number one place of advice for people who are in agriculture or even people starting out is like whenever you do something, ask the question, is this gonna have an ROI? Is this gonna have a return? Not in production. It might make us more productive, But it might not make us more profitable, and that's the key question we get asked with everything we do. So you gotta overturn your entire business. I mean, it might be thinking about where you're getting your bulls or how you're doing your bulls. It might be making hay, it might be when you calf. All those things we have to ask those questions and say. You know, that's not gonna make us money, even though it's the traditional way to do it. It's the way people have been doing it for, you know, multi-generations now. You know, we've had to ask every one of those things and take, take them one by one and say, is this really gonna be profitable for us in, in the place we are in agriculture?”

Elzinga didn’t just grow his acreage and cattle herd, he expanded the amount of value he was able to capture with his production but doing what he calls vertical stacking of enterprises.