Dynama+ Huscosts

Step 4 – Complete the Huscosts worksheet

Huscosts is a worksheet used to enter husbandry and treatment costs for the first year of the budget period. They then can be altered, if necessary, for all subsequent years in Tables 8A and 8B of the Dynama worksheet.

Costs can be allocated to sale and non-sale cattle for all classes and sexes of livestock. There are twenty lines available for individual cost categories. To assist with the listing of husbandry costs, the headings on each row can be renamed and the weaner age group is split into heifers and steers, making it easier to deal with sex specific costs such as the application of a growth promotant.

For reasons of consistency, it is better to enter selling costs in the Prices worksheet and not the Huscosts worksheet.

The compilation of some classes of husbandry costs, especially supplement costs, often requires some calculation based on daily consumption, time fed etc. These calculations and other explanations of the variable cost entries can be shown in the Note Pad section beneath the Summary table. Having these notes will help later if assumptions on husbandry inputs are changed as part of the budgeting process.

Quite often the husbandry costs incurred by sale cattle and retained cattle in the same age group can be quite different. In the Huscosts worksheet there are separate columns for husbandry costs incurred on sale cattle and husbandry costs incurred on kept cattle to allow separate costs to be entered for each group of cattle. The costs of sale cattle obviously do not include the costs of selling that have previously been entered in the Prices worksheet.

Husbandry costs on sale cattle will depend in part on when they are sold, e.g. cattle sold at the end of the wet season may have had the wet season phosphorus lick, but not the dry season urea lick. Pregnancy testing costs should apply equally to the cows kept and the cows sold. Weaning costs (hay, NLIS tags etc.) should apply equally to weaners kept and weaners sold. The question to ask is what part of the husbandry cost will be incurred by sale cattle from that group and whether there are any additional costs on sale cattle such as extra supplementation.

The Huscosts worksheet example Open the Huscosts worksheet in the Dynama+ titled Dynamaplus 10 years user manual base herd. It can be found in the scenario examples list on the Dynama+ tools page.

Note that data can only be entered in the cells with a yellow background and that the costs of steers and bulls are listed to the right of the female values and users have to scroll across the page to see them.

The husbandry costs expected to be incurred by the herd include the normal preventative vaccines for weaners and breeding cows as well as vaccines used locally such as a vaccine to prevent losses due to botulism. The method of calculating the cost per head of the dry season lick has been detailed in the note pad at the bottom of the worksheet as a reminder to the manager.

The cost per head incurred by each class of livestock has been entered in the relevant column against the item listed. For example, it can be seen that the cost of dry season lick will only be incurred by females that are kept in the breeding herd and not sold.

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Once all husbandry costs have been accounted for move onto the Assets worksheet.

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