What is Milkminder - and what will it do for me?

Milkminder is an invaluable dairy management tool, providing both financial and technical data to enable you to make informed decisions personal to your business. It’s an easy-to-use service available on the internet (or on paper with telephone access if you prefer).

All you need is your unique client number and password, and then at the click of a mouse you can scrutinise your business data – and benchmark your own herd performance against others – be it Margin over Purchased Feed per litre, or per cow, or per hectare.

Milkminder features include:

Each month you can enter your stock numbers, details of milk output and feed inputs, and you will instantly be able to monitor your margin progress over the year and look at the changes compared to the last 12 months. Significant changes are highlighted, identifying problem areas, allowing you to measure the effect of previous management decisions.

In addition, annual rolling figures will show you your results over the year, with graphs to illustrate your herd performance over 21 months in key areas such as milk output, butterfat and protein %, SCC and Bactoscan.

Milk Prediction:
These are increasingly being asked for (and well paid for) by milk buyers. Predicting how much milk you will produce for 12 months ahead is not easy to get accurate. Using the data you supply for calvings, culls etc, Milkminder can give you a forecast of your milk production for the quota year. As you enter the actual data each month, the easy to view graphical report is updated and adjusted, allowing you to keep an eye on your production (and quota position.)

Benchmarking:

So now you know how you are performing, but how does that compare to other farmers in your region and in the UK in general? Several thousand farmers are recording their results with Promar, which allows you to compare your performance with theirs.

You can view benchmark reports with data from other dairy farms in your region, national averages or the top 10% of the country, ranked by whatever measure you are interested in, for example MOPF per cow, feed costs per litre, or yield from forage, plus many more.

Instantly this allows you to see the areas in which you are outstanding and also highlights where you are under performing, leaving you to target your efforts to grow profits.

Coming Soon:

On this new Milkminder site you will be able to benchmark all of your other direct costs of milk production, such as the vet cost, replacement cost, AI costs, bedding cost, sundry chemicals, against other farmers. This benchmark data comes from the many hundreds of farms that use Promar Farm Business Accounts, where our farm business secretaries provide full farm management accounts, do the VAT and PAYE for clients, and is unique to Milkminder.

The service is supported by a dedicated agricultural and IT team who will be happy to provide you with all the assistance you need by e-mail or telephone. All your information is backed up, eliminating any risk associated with losing valuable data.