Tarleton State University

The Overall Goal of This Projet Is to Develop Usable and Readily Accessible Profitability Data That Will Equip Small and Medium Sized Dairy and Beef Grazing Operations in the Southern Great Plains to Become More Competitive in Contemporary Global Markets. the Key to the Competitiveness of Small and Medium-sized Operations Lies in the Choice of Optimal Production System Configurations - the Portfolio of Input, Livestock, Crop/forage, Waste, and Marketing (product) Management That Are Most Optimal for Their Herd Size. by Leveraging Decades of Dairy and Beef Grazing Production Systems Modeling and Analyses, We Will Be Able to Generate Profitability Data by Size and Production System That Small and Medium-sized Farmers Can Use to Enhance Their Financial Performance. We Will Synthesize the Data Into Readily Usable Form and Share Them With Producers and the General Public Through USDA'S Farmer-friendly, Web-based Nutrient Tracking Tool (ntt).to Achieve the Goal of This Project, We Will Use a Bio-economic Modeling System Comprising of Farm-level Economic Model and Agricultural Policy Environmental Extender. Alternative Production Systems Will Be Simulated for Dairy and Beef Grazing Operations of Each Applicable Size in Order to Determine the Production System That Is Most Profitable for Each Herd Size. We Will Use Data Disaggregation and Clustering Methods to Determine Applicable Size Groups for Each Farm Type and the Corresponding Production System Configurations to Simulate. We Will Combine the Data From This Project and Results From Previous Studies and Synthesize Them to Make Them More Useful and Transferrable to Producers Across the Nation.