Project.docx

Small Agribusiness Benefits from Python

Abstract

There are so many ways that data can be used to help facilitate business decision making. When data is readily available and easy to understand it can make the world of difference. Our paper is going to focus on a small agribusiness, Gold Farms in Washington, and the benefits it can receive from Python. Gold Farms sells duck eggs as well as other fruits and vegetables. The business is currently small and lacking adequate sales data, therefore our team will mockup the data to help us conduct the analysis and generate meaningful reports. Python will be used to calculate cost projections for the farm and predictions for the future. Furthermore, we will look at the ways that Gold Farms can save money on its overhead costs as well as see if there is any way their prices can be adjusted in order to maximize profits. The data acquired and processed will help Gold Farms to make decision on feed purchases, produce prices, and whether or not to get into the meat duck business. Using data analytics, reporting, and Python will help the business to break ground and move forward in a more rapid timeframe as well ensuring understanding of the data and what it means for the business.

Keywords: Small Agribusiness, Data Analytics and Reporting, Python, Sales Data, Future Cost Predictions
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1. INTRODUCTION

Small businesses face hurdles that larger organizations may not, which makes it all that much more important to have a concrete strategy that can be followed to maximize profitability. Having a history of data is extremely important as it helps small businesses to visualize their trends and look for ways to either adjust their strategy or cut costs. Some small business can lack the resources to accuratetly track and analyze the historical data, making it harder for them to make decisions to move forward.
Our team will work to get historical data for Gold Farms to, ultimately, understand the following:
1. Understand cost projections.
2. Predictions for the future.
3. Ways the farm can save money.
4. Determine if the farm should start selling other products.
5. Determine what they would need to sell on a yearly basis to net $80,000 a year and take on the business full-time.
The owners of Gold Farms currently run their business in addition to working a full-time 9 to 5 job. They would like to make their business successful enough so that they could quit their 9 to 5 and focus solely on expanding Gold Farms and increasing the number of product offerings, potentially expanding into the duck meat market.
As we review the began the process, we will rely heavily on the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) process to guide us. Using data mining, we’ll be able to better understand the data and make informed decisions. (GeeksforGeeks, 2019).

(GeeksforGeeks, 2019).
Once we have gathered the data to review, we will work to clean the data, transform it, and end up with meaningful reports that will help Gold Farms to make decisions regarding their business going forward. It will provide them with visibility into key metrics that will help them strategize for the future. No longer will Gold Farms have to estimate based upon a very limited record of data that was not standardized. Going forward, they’ll be able to see any trends that arise.

2. DATA COLLECTION

For this paper, we have a combination of real data and mocked data. The real data is cost data that is derived from the acutal costs of running a duck farm at our current scale. There are several recurring costs which are duck food and duck treats. These are purchased on a quarterly basis from either an online retailer or a local farm store. We have also included the start up costs, which include the costs of the different duck breeds and the price for the starter feed that ducklings eat.
Other real pieces of data included in our data set are, the amount of food each duck eats per day, the amount of food a duckling eats per day and the average number of eggs they lay per day.
The second type of data is mock sales data. The website has only been launched for a month or so, and for the purposes of this project, we have backfilled several months of sales data. The sales data is in CSV format with the headings, “week_number”,”total_orders”, “gross_income”. The week_number field is the numerical week of the first sale, starting at week 1. The total_oders field describes the total number of half-dozen egg orders (the primary SKU of Gold Farms) in a week. The gross income field is the price of a half-dozen eggs multiplied by the total number of orders for the week.

3. RESEARCH QUESTION

The question we want to answer using python is, “How many ducks would be required and at what price for the operator of Gold Farms to quit their day job?” For this paper the family must earn 100,000 a year to maintain their current standard of living and to meet all other financial obligations.

4. PYTHON SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT

[MARVIN?] I can dothis just going to need a little more time to actually write and walk through the code. For this section I can point out why I opted for an object oriented design.

5. REPORTS ANALYSIS

CONDUCT THE REPORT ANALYSIS – WHAT REPORTS ARE NEEDED AS WELL AS BENEFICIAL TO GOLD FARMS]

6. REPORT DEVELOPMENT

7. REPORT FINDINGS

8. HOW BUSINESS ANALYTICS BENEFITS SMALL BUSINESS

9. CONCLUSION

10. REFERENCES

GeeksforGeeks. (2019, August 20). KDD Process in Data Mining. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/kdd-process-in-data-mining/