In many cases, unpaid labor is more that one person. You may pay your kids and you do that for income tax purposes. Kids' salaries are part of the hired labor costs. The focus here is on unpaid family labor. This bottom line measure is the earned returns to the three resources that a ranch family contributes to the ranch business.
Cattlemen have a history of evaluating their beef cow herds via production ratios.
I frequently hear ranchers comment on ratios such as calf weaning weights compared to mature cow weights. The implication is that this ratio is highly correlated with profits. The reality is that many of these production ratios are more correlated with gross income than with profits. Costs of production are generally ignored by these production ratios. As a result, most of the production ratios used by the beef industry are very poor proxies for profits.