Many Hog Producers Spend Too Much Time On Factors That Don’t Matter

One of the guest speakers at the recent London Swine Conference acknowledges that pig production is a challenging business.

Steve Pollman of Murphy Brown says one of the biggest challenges is identifying some of the real key variables that influence profitability.

Pollman says the key production indicators they look at are number of pigs weaned per sow farrowed and wean to market livability and their growth rate.

He figures anything else is secondary.

Pollman also believes that many producers spend too much time on factors that in the end don’t really matter.

Pollman suggests that a lot of producers like to talk about pigs per sow per year, but says the Murphy Brown experience has been that’s not a very reliable indicator of good systems productivity.