Cost of Variation

     Had some time to spend with a young vet this week.  I was picking his brain about variation and its cost in pig production.  He related to me a story about a client who, while doing seemingly everything pretty well thought he was “missing one pig” (psy) and wanted this vet to “find the pig” for him. 

     He followed everyone around, observed everything from insemination techniques to farrowing and processing procedures and examined all the other practices as well as doing the prerequisite health checks etc. and didn’t find much out of order. 

Variation is a natural part of biological systems and a characteristic that cannot be eliminated. However, the wise producer will institute procedures from the boar stud to the final loading of the finished animals which at a minimum, does not increase the natural variation in growth. Variation costs money, lots of it. Since we adopted systems which produce weekly lots of pigs, the pigs flow through the farm in age-segregated groups, often moving two or three times to different locations. When their growth performance begins to spread, the time and the cost associated with their completion and marketing begins to rise.