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Optimizing Market Weights

Optimizing market weights means essentially maximize the profit in your production system. Pre-requisite for optimizing the market weight is the understanding of the production costs and parameters, knowing the target market weight of your pigs for your packer buying matrix. Also components as herd health, availability and cost of feed ingredients, barn space, time availability, market prices, packer buying programs and animal welfare are important. Having a complete plan includes solid production practices, a clear understanding of the economic factors in production and marketing, using those to determine the optimum market weight for your system, and delivering a pig in good condition to your abattoir will contribute to an overall profitability of the system. Knowing all your systems capabilities, strengths and weaknesses, and working together with experts from the industry can improve the profit of your production.

Source: Prairieswine


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Four Star Pork Industry Conf - Back to Basics: Fundamentals drive vaccine performance

Video: Four Star Pork Industry Conf - Back to Basics: Fundamentals drive vaccine performance

At a time when disease pressure continues to challenge pork production systems across the United States, vaccination remains one of the most valuable and heavily debated tools available to veterinarians and producers.

Speaking at the 2025 Four Star Pork Industry Conference in Muncie, Indiana, Dr. Daniel Gascho, veterinarian at Four Star Veterinary Service, encouraged the industry to return to fundamentals in how vaccines are selected, handled and administered across sow farms, gilt development units and grow-finish operations.

Gascho acknowledged at the outset that vaccination can quickly become a technical and sometimes tedious topic. But he said that real-world execution, not complex immunology, is where most vaccine failures occur.