Alberta Dairy producers invited to take part in new study

Published 1:00 pm Thursday, June 11, 2026

Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation recently launched its Alberta AgriProfit$ Dairy Benchmarking Study, giving Alberta Dairy producers a chance to better understand how much it costs them to produce milk on their farms and to compare their results with other producers.

“For many years we’ve done a cost of production study called the Provincial Dairy Cost Study, and this is a well-known study across the province and farmers use it, but we have redone it to be a little bit more detailed,” said Pauline Van Biert, research analyst at Agriculture and Irrigation in the economics section.

She added that the methodology is slightly different but still shares many similarities.

They’ve worked with Alberta Milk, which has helped them to understand the methodologies and some of the needs of the farmers.

“The study also incorporates some environmental details, which the previous one didn’t…”

This is the first year they are doing the study in the new format, using the new methodology.

They will be working to collect the 2025 farm data, and using that data to prepare the benchmark numbers.

“Producers will get a report for their own farm that highlights their cost of milk production. They’ll get their own farm numbers based on their data that they’re going to give to us,” said Van Biert, adding that they will also get a comparison of themselves to the provincial benchmark once those are finished.

“They’ll have a visual of how they are doing compared to their peers and others in Alberta doing the study.”

The reports are all confidential.

Producers can sign up online and someone will be in touch with them to go through filling in an Excel spreadsheet, asking them various topics like their inventory numbers (livestock flow, number of births, sales), what they are feeding their animals, agronomic information on the fields they grew the feed on and more.

“I think especially nowadays, understanding the costs is very important, because everything is fluctuating and going up. If I think back on the previous studies, there’s been a trend to go up, but then mostly because of feed costs, but then feed costs level off and go down a little bit, but then utilities go up, so one kind of offsets the other.”

She added that understanding costs is so important as it gives producers a bigger picture about what’s going on at their farm, seeing where there’s fluctuations, etc.