This publication is designed to help producers evaluate new enterprises for their farms or family businesses. It is based on a set of worksheets to help evaluate the Profitability, Resource requirements, Information needs, Marketing decisions, Enthusiasm for, and the Risk associated with a new enterprise. PRIMER is the acronym for these six factors. The text of the publication includes a discussion of each of these factors along with some introductory Yes/No/Maybe questions about each factor. There is also an introductory score sheet for each factor to get you thinking about the feasibility of a new endeavor. The worksheets at the end of the publication are more detailed and ask for information or ask questions that need to be answered before the decisions are made about the new enterprise. This is not a substitute for a whole farm plan, business plan, or marketing plan. Nor does it serve as a substitute for partial budgeting, full-cost enterprise budgeting, or the development of a mission statement for the business. However, it does help the user ask the right questions to evaluate the economics of an enterprise or profit center within the current business, and it can help in developing all the planning tools mentioned above.

This publication was designed to work across a wide range of crop, livestock, value-added, or service enterprises. Therefore, some of the worksheets raise questions that may not apply to all enterprises. Users should tailor their responses to their specific situations and use all available information to make a decision. Also, the order of PRIMER elements does not mean that enterprise evaluation should flow in sequence from Profitability to Risk. There is no particular order meant to be implied by this guide. All the issues should be addressed together as each component influences the others. PRIMER is simply a convenient and useful way to present the information.

Users may want to make multiple copies of the worksheets to evaluate different enterprises or to evaluate different scenarios of the same enterprise.

Author(s) Contact Information: 

Tim Woods  |  tim.woods@uky.edu

Steve Isaacs  |  sisaacs@uky.edu