The Margin Over Concentrate (MOC) online benchmarking tool helps Dairy Farmers to monitor herd performance. Assessing monthly milk production against variables like the amount of concentrate fed and allowing you to benchmark performance against your peers.
Importance of Recording Data and Benchmarking
Recording data on your farm is important for many reasons. It’s often necessary for legislation, but also crucial for assessing business performance.
By recording data, you can take steps to make your business more sustainable, plan for the future, pass on information, seek advice, recognise trends, make necessary changes, and benchmark your farm against your peers and producer averages. The Margin Over Concentrate Online Tool makes all of this quick and easy.
“…The MOC calculator provides a valuable way for dairy farmers to learn from their experiences, in conjunction with their CAFRE Adviser, if part of a Business Development Group. The launch of the MOC calculator is an aspect of the myNI.life social media campaign designed to improve farmer interaction across Northern Ireland”. Jason McFerran – DAERA
How does it work?
Each month, you take five minutes to enter a few figures for the previous month. There are three sets of figures required: Milking Status, Feed, Milk Details (See screenshots below).
These figures are then processed by the app and you can find out…
- Milk yield per cow/day (litres)
- Milk from forage (litres/cow/day)
- Concentrate fed per litre (kg/litre)
- Concentrate cost per litre (p/litre)
- Concentrate fed per cow/day (kg)
- Margin over concentrate (£/cow/day)
You can build up a picture of the herd performance over time so you can compare performance with this time last year. When twelve months of data has been entered, a set of annual rolling figures, based on your data, will be available.
These results are there to be discussed with your family, advisers, consultants, and other farmers. You can then base decisions on your data and make the best choices for your business. Each month you will see how you compare against the other anonymous farms on the system allowing you to benchmark your results.
Data entry screen on the MOC DAERA Online tool
Jason McFerran, (Senior Business Technologist, DAERA), gave a talk to Dairy Farmers on benchmarking at a CAFRE Open Day in 2018. He described how the Greenmount Herd performs and how CAFRE use benchmarking to monitor the performance of their Dairy herd.
Where Can I Find MOC Online?
MOC is available now via DAERA Online Services.
