Business

El Hato

A specialised dairy farm of 150 cows on 110 hectares in the Andean highlands of Colombia faces a full milk-price cycle: the base price is at a four-year high, a trader offers cows at peak prices, and the gremio outlook shows the price falling by a quarter while concentrate rises.

4 rounds MBA & Masters English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A specialised dairy farm of 150 cows on 110 hectares in the Andean highlands of Colombia faces a full milk-price cycle: the base price is at a four-year high, a trader offers cows at peak prices, and the gremio outlook shows the price falling by a quarter while concentrate rises.

Over four semesters the participant, as farm manager, decides the herd size and the ration at the peak, how to buy concentrate, which productivity investment to make and when, the animal-health programme and the milk buyer, how to handle the trough and a mastitis outbreak, and how to position the herd for the next cycle.

The model is deterministic: yield follows the ration, pasture capacity and somatic cell count; the processor pays by quality and rations milk in a glut; cash carries debt service and overdraft interest. The score combines the quality of each decision with margin, liquidity and the change in net worth over the cycle, and is capped for shipping milk with antibiotic residues or breaking the overdraft line.

Spanish (primary) and English.

Who it is for

An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Hato
  • Ración
  • Compra de concentrado (18 meses)
  • Inversión de productividad (se paga este semestre)
  • Programa sanitario
  • Comprador de la leche
  • Ración para el resto del ciclo
  • Respuesta al brote de mastitis
  • Compra de concentrado (12 meses)
  • Inversión

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • Semestre 1 · El pico
  • Semestre 2 · El precio empieza a caer
  • Semestre 3 · El valle
  • Semestre 4 · La recuperación

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