Shade River Dairy transforms operations through full cost visibility
Shade River Dairy operates in Mardella, in the peri-urban Serpentine River region, where it is one of two remaining dairy farms. Fifth-generation farmer Geoff Manning runs the business with his wife, Tish, and their daughter, Claire. The farm’s herd consists of about 300 registered Holstein Friesians, milked in a 20-aside herringbone parlour under a total mixed-ration system.
The business produces its own silage and hay and sends over 60,000 litres of milk weekly to Italian artisan cheesemakers in the local market. Rising expenses for feed, fertiliser, fuel and labour prompted the family to examine the cost of producing each litre. The farm had extensive operational experience but did not have a consolidated financial baseline for comparing efficiency or assessing investment decisions.
The Mannings joined Dairy Australia’s Dairy Farm Monitor Project, a process that required several months of manual record-keeping. They assembled information on feed expenditure, labour use, machinery fuel, herd results and debt repayments. The figures were entered into DairyBase, Dairy Australia’s national platform for physical and financial benchmarking.
The resulting assessment allowed Shade River Dairy to compare its cost structure with that of the best-performing 25% of Western Australian dairy farms. It also identified areas with relatively high expenses and smaller efficiency opportunities described in the source as “one-percenter” gains. The exercise provided the family with a business-wide record of costs rather than separate figures for individual activities.
To turn the assessment into a longer-term management plan, the farm appointed accredited consultant Tom Farran through Dairy Australia’s 24-month Our Farm Our Plan programme. The programme helped the family set formal business objectives, address risk and rank capital spending. Claire also attended the Raising the Roof 2026 intensive farming conference in Shepparton, where she examined Victorian approaches to dairy housing and effluent management.
Shade River Dairy additionally joined the newly established Dairy Business Network WA, which gives regional operators a forum for sharing management practices. Dairy Australia’s programmes were used alongside the farm’s benchmarking work as raw-milk prices and input costs remained volatile across Australasia. The source describes production-cost visibility as relevant to decisions on margins, barn infrastructure and succession within family dairy businesses.
