This meeting will focus on updates and key considerations in farm food safety. Topics to be covered include agricultural water quality assessments, traceability procedures, tips for improving flow and efficiency in wash/pack facilities, cleaning and sanitation updates, plus plenty of discussion to answer your questions. 

Your farm's big-3 financial records (balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flow) and how to use them to assess your overall financial situation. This information will help you assess what types of investments are likely to be viable for your farm business and whether or not you are likely to be able to use credit to finance that investment.  We will specifically cover Farm Profitability, Cash Flow, and Key Financial Ratios.

How do you create value?  How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?  In other words - what is your farm's business strategy?  Your investments should be in line with your strategy.  Different business strategies will result in investments in different parts of the Farm Business Value Chain.  Farm Business Value Chain - full range of activities needed to create a product or service.

Identifying the Enterprises in Your Value Chain.  Your Profit Centers and Cost Centers.  We will cover: Direct vs Indirect Costs and Cost Allocation and Variable vs Fixed Costs and Relevant Range (when does a fixed cost become a variable cost?)

Operating budgets are the overall financial plan for the business.  You can use a budget based on your current situation as the base to model new scenarios.

It is more time-consuming to develop detailed budgets for your enterprises, but it is worthwhile to do this for areas where you are considering making major investments.  We will demonstrate how to move from an operating budget to an enterprise budget to model specific scenarios within that enterprise. 

Introduces a structured process for a manager to go through to decide among options for long-term investments, projects or changes to the farm business.

As you change your prices, volume of sales or costs of production how does your profit change?  What is your break-even point and what output level do you need to achieve a target income? We will also cover sensitivity analysis that will help you see how your results will vary over a range of likely scenarios from best case to worst case.  This will help you assess the riskiness of your plan.

Capital budgeting is defined as the process used to determine whether capital assets are worth investing in. it's the process of asking: is an asset worth the resources it requires?  Capital assets are usually long-term investments like new equipment, facilities, and other infrastructure upgrades. By incorporating strategically planned capital budgeting into their financial processes, companies can more effectively determine and prioritize which projects, programs and other investment assets could be most financially beneficial in the long-term.

Please join us in-person for our annual winter advisory meeting where you can spend time with the team reviewing the team's educational programs and most importantly providing us feedback. Please pre-registration by December 14th at 1 PM.

The Eastern NY Commercial Hort Team and the Lake Ontario Fruit Team are offering a 1-day, hands-on course at 5 locations in NYS in January and February for tree fruit farms on using farm financial information and other resources to make decisions about long-term investments or changes to their business.  We will apply the techniques covered in the 8-part webinar series in December to scenarios using sample financial data from fruit farms in NYS.

The Eastern NY Commercial Hort Team and the Lake Ontario Fruit Team are offering a 1-day, hands-on course at 5 locations in NYS in January and February for tree fruit farms on using farm financial information and other resources to make decisions about long-term investments or changes to their business.  We will apply the techniques covered in the 8-part webinar series in December to scenarios using sample financial data from fruit farms in NYS.