MARYLAND LAMB CO-OP
WHAT'S THE LATEST?
Updated March 28, 2023
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With the production spreadsheets done, the MLC project is in a holding pattern until May. Skywoman's livestock principal is in a critical phase of working with the Blackbird Collective to get a bunch of tasks running on their own; once that work is complete we will begin on-site audits to tune the production sheets to MLC's actual production data.
Background
Maryland Lamb Co-op is a marketing cooperative of New Roots Farm, Blueland Farm, and Aeire Farm East (this last farm is the largest of the operators and will be the focus of the study). The farms also occasionally cooperate on some operations items - trailering, shearing, etc. - but for the most part the cooperative revolves around sales. The group, poised to grow, wants to get a handle on its production costs to ensure that it can scale responsibly.
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Project Overview
Skywoman was contacted in October by Sarah Campbell of New Roots Farm, one of three members of the Maryland Lamb Co-op, with a request to help the group develop budgeting and operations spreadsheets. There were two goals in particular: 1.) to know down to the penny how much the producers were spending to get lamb, mutton, and wool to market, and 2.) to cut those costs as much as possible and make them consistent to ensure the group’s future financial stability.
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Working Plan
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Phase I: Based on our discussions with Emily, the Skywoman team is developing a dashboard that assigns values to 52 production variables and, from that, determines all the incremental costs of the operation: 1.) birth to wean, 2.) wean to breeder, 3.) breeding ewe lifecycle cost, 4.) wean to butcher, and 5.) breeding ram lifecycle cost. This dashboard was completed about a week before Christmas, with each of the variables loaded with estimated values from Emily or, where she didn’t have the numbers, from industry standards.
Phase II: A Skywoman ground team will make several visits to AEF to measure the farm’s actual production values, so that the production costs in the dashboard match the farm’s actual performance. This will give MLC the precise production costs they’ve been looking for, which will provide benchmarks for improvement.
Phase III: The Skywoman team will work with MLC on an ongoing basis to improve performance, largely providing value as an unbiased third party. Once these improvements have been maxed out, Skywoman will publish MLC’s production designs as patterns that can be used by other producers to lower their costs and scale their operations
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Project Timeline
October 2022
Introductory Meeting
Skywoman was contacted in October by Sarah Campbell of New Roots Farm, one of three members of the Maryland Lamb Co-op, with a request to help the group develop budgeting and operations spreadsheets. There were two goals in particular: 1.) to know down to the penny how much the producers were spending to get lamb, mutton, and wool to market, and 2.) to cut those costs as much as possible and make them consistent to ensure the group’s future financial stability.
October 2022 - January 2023
Building production analysis tools
The Skywoman was able to complete Phase I of the project by January 2023, creating a dashboard that integrated the complex and interrelated costs of breeding, slaughtering, lambing, and shearing sheep. The rough draft of the dashboard was sent to MLC with placeholder values for some unknown production variables (like chores times, feed consumption, etc.); from here the project went on a brief hiatus until the end of Spring when Skywoman's livestock principal would be free to travel for consecutive days to the MLC farms.
Interested in the full project report?