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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate possible outcomes and problems of merging farm data sets from multiple states in order to build a statistically sound body of financial information that will help individual farmers analyze their own situations. This paper is in support of a grant titled "Regional/Multi-State Interpretation of Small Farm Financial Data" recently funded by USDA - IFAFS - Farm Efficiency and Profitability. Financial data sets came from dairy farms using management intensive grazing (MIG) strategies during 1999. There were 12 farms from Michigan and 19 farms from Wisconsin. Finpack and Finansum were used to process the data from all farms. Definitions and formulas are not given in this paper as they can be found in Finpack users' guides and manuals. The averages for all 31 farms are given in Tables 1 through 10 plus Figures 1 and 2. The averages for farms with less than 70 milk cows are given in Tables 11 through 20. Averages for farms with over 70 cows are in Tables 21 through 30. Towards the end of the paper is a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the data set and what should be considered as more states' data are merged into the grant project. The last page, Table 32, gives some income and expense categories on a per cow basis which may be useful in doing an individual farm comparative analysis.

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