2007/716 Passion for Prawns: Benchmarking Performance

By Jamie O’Brien

OBJECTIVES:
As identified in APFA's five-year development plan, there is a need to grow the Australian prawn farming industry in an economic and environmentally sustainable manner. This will be achieved by:

• Increasing yields per hectare
• Decreasing costs per hectare or per kilogram
• Increasing returns per hectare or per kilogram
• Increasing the total size of the industry

Farms generally operate in isolation from one another and technical, marketing and financial information is not shared, therefore farmers do not have the opportunity to test or evaluate current practices against those used by other farms in an objective manner.
The benchmarking data will give farmers a tool set that will:

• Allow farmers to anonymously compare their business performance against other farmers;
• Allow farmers to evaluate / test new production and marketing practices against standard industry benchmarks to evaluate potential or possible business improvement;
• Allow farmers to carry out their day-to-day business with minimal time and input to update the program and the APFA will update on an annual basis.

It was identified that the above would also enable the APFA to use the output data to assist farmers in further improving their profitability and chain efficiency.