Optimizing Market Weights

Jul 24, 2015

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

Video: Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

I am going to show you how we save our farm money by making our own pig feed. It's the same process as making our cattle feed just with a slight adjustment to our grinder/ mixer that makes all the difference. We buy all the feed stuff required to make the total mix feed. Run each through the mixer and at the end of the process we have a product that can be consumed by our pigs.

I am the 2nd generation to live on this property after my parents purchased it in 1978. As a child my father hobby farmed pigs for a couple years and ran a vegetable garden. But we were not a farm by any stretch of the imagination. There were however many family dairy farms surrounding us. So naturally I was hooked with farming since I saw my first tractor. As time went on, I worked for a couple of these farms and that only fueled my love of agriculture. In 2019 I was able to move back home as my parents were ready to downsize and I was ready to try my hand at farming. Stacy and logan share the same love of farming as I do. Stacy growing up on her family's dairy farm and logans exposure of farming/tractors at a very young age. We all share this same passion to grow a quality/healthy product to share with our community. Join us on this journey and see where the farm life takes us.