Ranch Business Management for the 21st Century

Course Description

Advanced Ranch Management, Range 485, is the capstone course for the Range Major at South Dakota State University. This course requires students to integrate knowledge from previous coursework in Animal and Range Sciences, Agricultural Economics and Business Management, and related experiences. The focus of this course is on developing a business framework to improve planning skills, financial analysis, decision making skills with respect to ranching enterprises. A key component of this course is an extensive ranch planning exercise, which integrates the many factors influencing ranch sustainability and incorporates the use of decision support tools to evaluate management strategies. 

 

Lab Description

Lab activities for this course will center around the analysis of an existing ranch business to find the strengths and weaknesses of the business. Students will have the option of using a prefabricated ranch provided for the lab portion of the class or they may choose to gather the necessary information and conduct a full analysis on their own ranch business or their families ranch business. Students will use a series of business, production, and financial management tools to evaluate the current position of their ranch business. These tools include formulating a series of financial statements from which a financial ratio analysis can be evaluated, conducting a standardized performance analysis (SPA) to evaluate livestock herd efficiency, and develop an enterprise analyses on different facets of their ranch business. Once the initial position of the ranch business has been identified, students will propose and incorporate business, production, and financial management improvements and develop a new business plan for the ranch based on these proposed improvements. Additionally the new plan with contain the development of drought, emergency, human resource, and marketing plans, long range enterprise budgeting and financial forecasts as a means of improving profitability over the short– and long-term.