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Cost control in milk production is one of the main bottlenecks in the activity. To help with this task, Agricultural Research Company of Minas Gerais (Epamig)) developed and made available, free of charge, the Dairy Activity Cost Management (Gercal) application. After entering registration and financial data and information about the herd, the system allows the compilation and presentation of results through a consolidated statement.
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“Gercal is a free application, specific for management accounting and calculation of production costs for properties dedicated to milk production, which can be used by milk producers, dairy property managers and technicians from the public and private sectors. It has simple language and easy operation, in addition to running on the Android system, with download available from the Play Store, which makes it easily accessible to most smartphones”, explains Djalma Pelegrini, researcher at Epamig, and one of the tool's creators.
economic performance
According to Epaming, economist Thiago Ladeira, developer of the application, highlights that the consolidated report allows the producer, manager or technician to interpret the economic-financial performance of the property. “The consolidated statement presents the sum of revenues, expenses and costs (effective operating, depreciation, total operating and unit cost of milk), and also the Gross Margin and Net Margin. It also serves as a very useful instrument for evaluating the technical performance of the property, which makes it possible to indicate interventions in the production system, if necessary.”
Pelegrini adds that Gercal is available to all dairy farmers, but it should be most useful for small-scale farmers who want to start managing costs. “It’s a app easy to operate, which does not record zootechnical data and is specific for the economic and financial management of milk production properties. However, considering that milk producers who operate on a medium and large scale, in general, already adopt some type of management tool, we believe that Gercal can be more widely used by those producers who operate on a small scale and who, for now, do not use any type of software or application to manage their properties”.
Required application
Nair Ferreira Campos Batista is responsible for the financial management of a milk producing property, which she maintains with her husband in the municipality of João Pinheiro (MG). “Our work is entirely focused on dairy farming, we have even researched alternatives for diversification, but we persist in the activity that has been going on for generations in my husband's family. Our average production is 800 liters and we sell it to a cooperative in the region (CCPR)”.
The producer, who has been in the business for 30 years, says that she found out about Gercal on the internet about six months ago and immediately made contact to learn more about the application. “As I come from the management field, I know the need to keep track of expenses and income. It is a necessary tool for producers, who need to know their needs and properly manage their property's expenses. The consolidated report contains a lot of information. In the specific case of our farm, I combine this information with data from manual forms, which we fill out for the cooperative”.
For Nair, livestock farmers need technical and technological support to guarantee the viability and sustainability of the activity. “We know that those who are involved in dairy farming are persistent, committed to the love of production and property, but the costs are very high and the profits have not grown at the same rate, on the contrary, they sometimes fluctuate downwards. We need more tools like Gercal that allow us to have more accurate data, animal by animal, that can help us make decisions.”
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