Develop an outline business assessment tool identifying the key information and outputs that would be required to assess a livestock enterprise. In your assessment tool, you should explicitly identify how you would collate, analyse and present the information as part of a livestock business report. The tool should include details on how to benchmark current physical and financial performance, how you would identify future direction options and how you would develop a future business plan.

While developing a livestock business assessment tool you should be considering how this might be linked to future innovation options for a livestock business. The assessment item should be a written report and regarded as a business assessment tool that can be used to gather information for a business report. The tool should have clearly defined sections and identify explicit questions and information that will be gathered from a farmer as part of the second assessment. Number of words (800 +/- 10%). The students have an element of freedom to derive a structure for the business assessment tool, nevertheless an exemplar is also provided on Moodle.

The assessment tool will also be used for Assessments 2 and 3 where you will interview (either visual or phone/Zoom) a grazier and have access to a data set from a case-study farming enterprise (profit and loss and balance sheet).

You are to assume the location of the property is in the central Queensland region.

· Demonstrated capability to link information gathering to analyses

· Demonstration that you have researched the practicality and relevance of the information you will seek to gather

· Presentation of the document

Further details and a marking rubric will be available on the Moodle page.

Using the business assessment tool developed in Assessment 1, you are required to interview your nominated farmer about the key physical and financial influences on their production system. During the interview, you should identify the market for their product so you can ask questions to establish how that links back to their on-farm practices (note: you require details of the strategic decisions they make, not just the livestock productivity targets). You are then required to summarise the key points from your interview in a 12-minute PowerPoint presentation (i.e., about 12 slides) that should be pitched to a non-expert. The presentation will be evaluated by a primary student evaluator with contributions from the lecturer, guests and fellow students. The primary student evaluator will be graded on their contribution to the evaluation session at the practice presentations (Week 7 Monday 26 April). A pdf of the presentation is to be submitted for marking (Assessment 2) by Friday 30 April.

The presentation ought to include:

· an introduction of the enterprise;

· an outline of the key physical and financial influences of the production system gathered from the producer;

· details of strategic priorities;

· your assessment of the farmer's willingness/capacity to engage in new practices and/or technologies;

· an example(s) of an interview question with answer; and

· conclusion.

You will be assessed on: Demonstrate that you can engage with the farmer and are able to communicate and respond to their information. There will be two aspects to the assessment: 1) You give a practice presentation for peer group discussion and evaluation; and 2) you make any changes deemed necessary and convert the PowerPoint presentation into a pdf file for submission by due date 30/04/2021 for marking. The class presentation will also be evaluated by school staff. Please regard this presentation as a draft and use feedback from your talk to improve your Assessment 2 and/or ask further questions of the farmer. Your contribution to the group evaluation will receive a mark in the ‘Audience engagement’ section of the Assessment 2 marking rubric

Using the data and information supplied from a case study of a mixed farming (livestock/cropping) enterprise you are required to write a business report on the livestock aspect of the enterprise. This report should present a summary of your assessment of the enterprise and through analyses identify business strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats. Consider a proposal for a new business venture or adoption of an innovation. Hence, identify where there are business opportunities for change and link these to the application of an area of emerging innovation. The report should also identify how the business can use ongoing monitoring to track progress against clearly defined goals.

More detailed information on the task is available on the Moodle page of this unit.

You will be assessed on:

• Content
• Structure
• Writing style
• Grammar/spelling
• Referencing (must include peer reviewed journal citations)
• Number of words (2500 - 3000)

Further details and a marking rubric are available on the Moodle site of this unit.