Yvette Longenecker Describes How They Balance Growth and Profitability When Managing Satellite Operations

Modernizing Facilities and Working With Family

Too often, we hear about dairies that are exiting the industry or those without a next generation. We don’t always hear how dairy farm families are positioning their operations for the future. In this episode of Cow-Side Conversations, Yvette Longenecker of Penn England LLC in Blair County, Pennsylvania shares how they work to find the sweet spot between growth and profitability.

With six partners, about 2,100 mature cows, 3,600 acres, 50 employees and three different facilities, patience has been key when evaluating new projects or expansions. She describes their current building project and how they are working to drive efficiency and better manage milk production and quality. Yvette also opens up about how to navigate a family business during periods of growth, when to embrace opportunity versus stay patient, and how they use benchmarking to evaluate the return on possible expansion projects so they don’t over-leverage themselves.

Profitability and growth. “When it comes to growth and profitability, it’s hard to have one without the other. You need to be growing, even if it’s just growing in efficiencies or reducing your expenses and growing your herd with good cows. That should lead to profitability. Now, we can’t control the market. We all know that. We have to ride the ups and downs. We’ve started to believe that efficiencies are the most important thing about being profitable over the long term. Overall, we try to have a long-term focus and get as much out of the facilities, the ground, and the cows that we can.”

“We try and watch our equity standing. We don’t want to over-leverage ourselves with certain projects that aren’t going to have a return to us in a decent amount of time. We use the Dairy Profit Analyzer to watch where we are within the industry among our peers, make sure we’re hitting production goals, and monitor our cost structures to keep ahold of the expense side of our income statement. We really try to watch production, try to control our costs, and make investments where we feel efficiencies can be gained.”

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