I have been wondering for some time now how long it will take the swine industry to conceive of what it does as “precision agriculture.” Traveling around as I do, I have seen some potential candidates for that moniker, but the vast majority of swine producers I run into are still trapped in a “raisin’ hogs” mentality. The structuralized price paralysis that has a death grip on the industry is beckoning the “raisin’ hogs” crowd to kick it up a notch. Since we are bound-and-determined not to budge any farther regarding production cuts, it becomes necessary to pull the waste out the system. Believe me, there is plenty there, especially among low-cost producers.
I like to talk about precision agriculture in the pork business as production that matches up to intentions. Intentional production is marketing every pig that comes into your care at or near its profit-maximizing weight with a substantial premium for quality (such as lean percent) and this is accomplished at the least possible cost. That’s the full-value pig and that, after all, is your intention, right?
One of the ways I measure how much imprecision (i.e. sloppiness) is in a system is to calculate the average return over feed cost for a subset of pigs that are within, say, five to ten pounds of the profit-optimal weight and have an above-average lean percent (the intended outcomes). Depending on how rigorously you define this range (especially proximity in pounds to the profit-optimal weight) you can get from three to thirty percent of your pigs in range. If
you are into giving participation ribbons to your pigs regardless of their profitability then you might define the range larger, like the weight range the packer doesn’t discount and any lean percent that doesn’t receive a discount. That is the typical range many producers pick to define a “standard pig” and unfortunately, the strategic future is not going to include too many people who use that definition to amass a high percentage metric and then rest on these laurels.
Using the individual carcass data, you can calculate the difference between each and every pig’s return over feed cost and this standard return for the full-value pigs described above. This difference provides a measure of opportunity cost or “failure of precision” for each pig. Try adding it up for each truckload marketed or each building in a complex or site, and examine it along with your ADG and FE as you benchmark performance. The resulting number is pretty astounding on a building level and would shock most producers who think they are low cost and running a pretty tight ship.
This exercise will be revealing, as records systems are blind to this information and therefore, so are you. One of the most interesting things to consider is the opportunity cost: not of the hospital pen, which draws so much focus; but of the majority of pigs that are in the standard weight range (the weight range that does not receive a packer sort-loss discount). The kill sheet is quick to point out the discounts for animals over or under the packer-specified weight range but nobody sends you a report on the lost opportunity remaining in a 260-lb. pig that would have made more money at 268 lbs., for instance, and there are thousands like that.
Since most producers in the United States market pigs within an 80-100 lb. weight range, the remaining value in that distribution of pigs around the average target weight is substantial. It is also virtually hidden from scrutiny (and subsequent action plan development) due to a failure to measure the value.
Precision pork production means capturing a substantial part of the opportunity that is left on the table by current, low-cost conventional production systems. There is a much brighter future in precision pork production than in stripping out more cost, deferring more maintenance, subtracting another vaccine, lowering the qualifications and pay of the labor force, and generally creating a work environment where nobody is capable of taking you to the next level or working at the next level of precision agriculture would care to work.
Editor’s Note: Dr. Dennis DiPietre is a swine consultant in Columbia, Missouri. His monthly commentary is sponsored by Elanco Animal Health. For more information, go to: www.elanco.com
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