The user needs to determine his total family expenses and divide this figure by the total number of acres in the operation. This figure is then entered on the Other Overhead line on the Summary screen. The stocker cattle portion of BudPro is designed to evaluate the profitability of grazing stocker cattle on forage. The user supplies information based on an expected group of cattle. The program constructs a budget using this information and calculates expected returns per purchased head of cattle, along with determining their break-even selling prices.
Additional items generated by the program include two sensitivity tables.
These tables use the basic information supplied by the user for the initial set of cattle along with varying purchase prices and average daily gain so that many scenarios can be analyzed. The first table uses these factors to determine break-even prices given the various mixes of purchase price and average daily gain. The second table also includes the use of a sliding selling price in order to more realistically reflect what the selling price and returns per head would be given different average daily gains from the cattle. The magnitude of the slide is determined by the user. It is best to begin by defining the assumptions about the cattle.