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Digital Dairy Business Management and Marketing Education

C. Wilson Gray

Summary

The “Digital Dairy Business Management and Marketing Education” project targets small and medium sized dairy operations although any size operation may make use of the materials. We restructured management and marketing information into a digital format using internet web resources contained within the University of Wisconsin’s Understanding Dairy Markets (http://future.aae.wisc.edu) web site. Website based educational materials provide dairy operators the means to take a workshop at home and keep updated on current risk tools and markets by using the web resources. Operators can obtain the materials and work through the various modules at their own pace. Risk tools include dairy futures and options contracts, forward contracts with processors, and risk insurance products such as AGRI-Lite. Producers can also learn about the need for records to track costs-of-production and the benefits of business and marketing plans. After modification and updating of materials for use in a web-based delivery system, the focus is on program materials for producers and refining delivery methods. This website utilizes an integrated SQL database system containing over 500 data series maintained on a daily basis as well as a searchable database collection of dairy marketing related manuscripts.
A measure of utilization is the number of unique IP numbers (a proxy for “visitors”) that visited the website over the Sept. 2007-April 2008 period. The average number of visitors per month was more than 5,700 and growing. Approximately 3.4 GB/month of information was downloaded from the website. Each user averaged more than 0.5 MB worth of information per month.

Details

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