5 Ideas for Becoming a Successful Rancher

Posted by SLN Staff on Jul 25th, 2015 | Comments Off home title

5 Ideas for Becoming a Successful Rancher

To become a successful rancher, you must learn from the experts. Running a farm can be a 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year job. So what does it take to become a successful rancher?

Running a successful cattle ranch is a full time business. It requires a lot of attention and hard work. Moreover, the cost of fuel, equipment and supplies can add up to the cattle farming costs. Unless you manage all resources and keep your costs to the minimum, you will not be able to run your business successfully.

Your success in Ranch management

A rancher has to continuously monitor and best utilize all the available resources. Success highly depends on how well you manage your ranch and how well you use resources like soil, sunlight, rainfall, and your innovative and clever ideas, rather than depending on fossil fuels and equipment.

To become a successful rancher, you should pay attention to the following factors.

1. Ranch Size

Ranch size has a significant economic effect on the ranchers. Unless you have some other sources of income, such as profits from Agritourism, or other businesses, generating profit from small farms is a difficult job. Small ranchers struggle to be profitable and sustain a good standard of life unless they are involved in some kind of off farm jobs as well. However, it is important to keep it simple and keep the overhead low, or it can become impossible to manage all of the ventures.

2. Experienced Team

Another important factor for maximizing the profit from your ranch is to put together an experienced management team for your farm. You need skilled and experienced men and women, who will also stay honest and loyal to your farm. You also need people with various other skills like human resource managers, accountants, cattle health experts, field workers, marketers, and so on. Profitability often comes from numbers and scale.

3. Distribution of Labor

When you are a farmer, you have costs associated with the number of people working on your farm. Ranchers have more costs associated with workers than they have with cows. Pay attention to the number of workers you have per task and the output you are getting. If you have too many people working for less production your profits are going to be low. On the other hand, if you have one person for managing 800 cows for example, your profit is going to be relatively high.

4. Grazing management

Increasing your ranch area will usually increase your profit. When you have a larger area, you are able to graze more animals and have more resources available. It also gives you more room for expansion in the future. However, land is expensive. It’s much less expensive to improve and increase carrying capacity than to purchase more land. You could add fences, develop stock water reservoirs, and manage grazing and animal health more efficiently. You don’t necessarily spend more money or incur more overheads when you add cows to your ranch; grazing management is one of the most important keys to success in a cattle ranch.

5. Feed management

Efficient grazing and feeding techniques will significantly reduce your feeding costs. Grazing more and using less feed and supplements can increase your profit. All your hay lands and grasslands can be used for grazing. Financial progress is possible when you graze more and feed less.

Conclusion

To increase profit from your cattle ranch, or any kind of ranch, it’s important that you keep your costs, overhead and debt ratio low. An experienced team of managers is needed to manage your staff, and also to manage your animals well. Most ranchers that do succeed are innovative and use most of their resources efficiently. Becoming a cattle rancher can be rewarding if done right, but it could also be frustrating and plenty of hard work.

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