NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

June 24, 1999

Harlan Hughes, Extension Livestock Economist
NDSU Extension Service

While North Dakota has been a pioneer in Integrated Resource Management (IRM) and has had 10 years of IRM experience, the time has come to see how this educational program should be revised. As the North Dakota State University Extension Service plans its future educational programs, North Dakota's IRM educational program will need to change. The first step in making change is to study how neighboring states are approaching their IRM educational responsibilities. It only makes sense to try to integrate the strong points of other states' IRM programs into North Dakota's.

Let's first review why IRM came into existence. In the late 1980s a group of Extension specialists from around the United States met with a subcommittee of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association's (NCBA) research committee, and IRM was conceived as a national beef educational effort. Out of this committee effort came the published Standardized Performance Analysis (SPA) guidelines. These management guidelines were unique because they integrated business financial measures into production measures. Since then, most state Extension services and state cattlemen's associations have promoted IRM. The foundation of each state's IRM educational program is the national SPA guidelines.

The United States has now been divided into several regions, and NCBA is sponsoring regional IRM committees to tailor the implementation of the SPA guidelines to as many of that region's beef producers as possible. The Northern Plains IRM Committee was made up of university representatives from Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. Montana's representative could not be present.

Renee Lloyd, NCBA director of production systems, said the regional IRM committees are identifying that region's critical control points for profitability in beef cow operations.

Another IRM project is development of a national CD-ROM of U.S. beef publications. A non-profit organization was formed to handle the production and distribution of this beef database. A prototype will be demonstrated at the January 2000 Phoenix, Ariz., NCBA convention.

South Dakota is conducting hands-on IRM-SPA workshops with producers across the state. In these workshops, four to five participants sit at a microcomputer running IRM-SPA-EZ software. The focus is on the IRM process as many beef cow producers do not yet have the farm business management numbers needed to do a thorough economic analysis of their business. In the last two years, they have worked with 75 to 80 producers.

South Dakota is also developing a questionnaire to be used with beef cow producers to identify characteristics that can be related to the financial and economic performance of individual herds. This information will be used in conjunction with their IRM-SPA database for developing benchmark herds for South Dakota. Knowing that the transition to business management is long term, South Dakota is introducing SPA into university classrooms.

Nebraska has taken a little different approach to IRM educational programming. They organize IRM groups across the state that design their own agendas. As many as 21 IRM clubs have been going at one time across the state. These groups come and go, depending on the original goals of that specific group. Once the goals have been met, the groups dissolve. An annual state wide conference targets these IRM cooperators, and the state IRM committee meets three times a year with the Nebraska Cattlemen's Association.

Wyoming focuses its early IRM energies on taking SPA-EZ to university classrooms. Students are asked to evaluate their home ranches where possible. Wyoming distributed 2,000 IRM Red Books last year to producers statewide. Wyoming also announced that the four state—Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado and South Dakota—regional Range Beef Conference will be Dec. 14-16 in Greeley, Colo. The last four-state conference drew more than 1,000 participants.

Minnesota's Beef Focus Team, consisting of 8 to 10 county educators and selected state wide extension specialists, offered self-study courses on beef nutrition and health management. More than 600 producers completed these self-study courses last year. A third course is now being planned. Minnesota also offered a two and one-half day IRM conference.

FINPACK—a business financial analysis and business planning software system—is being used in Minnesota. Five thousand producers are on FINPACK, including 190 beef cow producers. Several other states, including North Dakota and South Dakota, are using FINPACK for financial analysis of farms and ranches. North Dakota has approximately 1,000 farms on FINPACK, including 180 beef farms and ranches.

The producers of FINPACK are now integrating the IRM-SPA guidelines into its year-end business summary. The goal is to bring several hundred year-end analyses into NCBA's national IRM-SPA database.

Iowa has a very active IRM program. A comprehensive year-end financial and production analysis program is available to participating beef farmers. Iowa has also expanded IRM into its College of Veterinary Medicine curriculum. Twenty students were selected to participate in this new IRM training program. Students were first introduced to the Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota IRM programs and software. Students were then required to identify a herd from their home state on which to conduct an IRM analysis. Local veterinarians were involved in the students' herd analyses. The second year curriculum is now under development.

Illinois adopted the Iowa SPA program and now has five years of SPA data on Illinois herds. Staff started out going to each participating farm for a day to prepare the analyses but now go to central locations and meet with several producers at the same time. They described their current meetings as a study-hall environment for closing out the cooperators' IRM record books. Illinois has a one-day summer meeting for all IRM cooperators. In the future, they plan to develop case studies of multiple-year cooperator herds to use for teaching. They have developed SPA beginner materials to expand their IRM program.

North Dakota's state report focused on what we have learned from 10 years of IRM educational programming and was summarized in my last Market Advisor.

As you can see, the Northern Plains states are actively implementing the SPA financial and production guidelines. Thanks, NCBA, for facilitating these educational efforts.

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Source: Harlan Hughes (701) 231-7380 hhughes@ndsuext.nodak.edu

Editor: Tom Jirik (701) 231-9629