Benchmark Magazine Article Archive

The improvement and growth of the agriculture economy means more jobs are becoming available within the industry. "The outlook for hiring employees in the pork industry is excellent for 2011," says Eric Spell, president of AgCareers. com. "This year, we?ve seen a significant increase in job listings in the pork industry on AgCareers.com".

When the PigCHAMP Care 3000 software program was introduced in 2007, it quietly marked an important turning point in commercial pork production. PigCHAMP had taken the combined knowledge of nearly 30 years of working with producers, consultants, veterinarians and allied industry to create the standard in reproductive record keeping and analysis for the next 30 years. Within six months, the new PigCHAMP became the most widely used swine program in North America.

We know that almost all benchmarking is carried out utilizing the average value of the various performance metrics of the farm over a period of time. The average is a very important and revealing number, and while it is still necessary, it is no longer sufficient to tune production systems for the challenge laid down by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). We know that averages by themselves hide a lot of critical information in the production process.

The National Swine Nutrition Guide (NSNG) is a sensible, easy-to-use source of nutrition information and recommendations. Its companion piece, the Diet Evaluation and Formulation Software DVD, is also very user-friendly and has the flexibility for producers to custom-build their rations based on feedstuffs available, their own nutrient analyses of feedstuffs and their own desires as far as the final nutrient makeup of the diet is concerned.

From weekly performance monitors in the sow herd to group closeouts in finishing, pork producers are accustomed to looking at data. Targets are established, performance is compared and improvements are pursued.

Historically, the majority of the selection emphasis for maternal line selection has focused on number of pigs born alive and 21-day litter weight. While these traits adequately measure overall sow productivity, selection based on these two traits alone would not incorporate sow efficiency evaluation or measurement. Just because a sow can produce a litter with a large number of heavy piglets at weaning, does not mean that she is profitable to the producer.

Breeding herd records are central to our industry and our daily lives. As the old adage goes, "You can't manage what you can't measure." Record systems help producers track every possible production parameter in an effort to measure, monitor and, ultimately, manage these parameters.

The last time hog futures achieved record highs was when the June 2009 futures contract reached US$100.30/cwt in the summer of 2008, when China was buying a record amount of U.S. pork for the Summer Olympics. Unfortunately, when this Chinese demand evaporated, coupled with the global recession in the fall and winter of 2008 and the drop in feed prices, hog futures fell hard.

This study investigated relationships between gilts that had at least one recorded estrus prior to breeding compared to gilts that had none. The subsequent performance over their lifetime was compared with gilts that did not have a recorded heat. This population study was conducted using 258 farms (330,000 sows) that are located in North America. The data was sourced from PigCHAMP® Knowledge Center Database from 2007 to 2009. This article provides insight into recording and heat-checking gilts.

As defined in Wikipedia, benchmarking "is the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries." At The HANOR Family of Companies, we use the PigCHAMP benchmarking reports to compare ourselves with some of the best producers in the industry.

Benchmarking provides an opportunity for the retrospective review of industry performance. The present year-end summaries reveal interesting numbers in comparison to what we saw five years ago. 2010 was another year of improved overall performance for U.S. herds, despite wide variations among individual farms. The U.S. herds showed significant improvements in performance in terms of key variables of average pigs born alive per litter (11.47 versus 10.64 perviously), farrowing rate (81.46 compared to 78.54 previously) and pigs weaned per mated female per year (23.09 versus 21.78 previously).

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations recently issued a report announcing that the world is confronting the staggering challenge of increasing food production 50 percent by the year 2030 and doubling total food production by the year 2050. If this Herculean challenge is not enough, it will take place in an environment where many of the old standards, rules of thumb and other landmarks of familiarity used by producers to understand their businesses are fading away rapidly.