efficiency

     For years, modern swine producers thought about cost of production as a point or single number.  For almost a decade, a cost of production of 38 cents a pound was consider standard, high efficiency cost control.  Those days are gone and I don't mean just that number.  There is no new number which is or will be the normal cost of production for all of us who love to live by rules of thumb.  The cost of production for meat animals is largely determined by the cost of the underlying feed ingredients which have entered a phase of volatilty that is not likely to abate.  The continued mandates for ethanol production which will absorb four billion bushels of US corn production will keep key feed ingredient prices on a perpetual "stocks-to-use" razor and provide another source of price volatility here-to-fore reserved for weather events alone.  The combined impact of weather and reduced stocks-to-use values will force the volatility of the grain sector into the

SwineCast 0371 Show Notes:

• Special feed efficiency roundtable featuring vets, nutritionists and lenders assembled by Beck Ag for Elanco Animal Health

SwineCast 0368 Show Notes:

• Pig crop report overview.  Link to Jim Long's comments. 
• PIC's Noel Williams looks at increasing efficiency through genetic selection and nutrition
• Walmart's iRiver E100 video mp3 player clearance

What started out as a way to place a hurdle to imports of meat into this country and thereby protect producers from foreign competition, has been wrapped up in a nice package of consumer information/awareness and now is finally coming to some reduced form realization.

SwineCast 0319a Show Notes:

• Special presentation of Dr. Bob Morrison's "At The Meeting" group reviewing impacts on efficiency at the farm level
  

Take a look at the above chart which was produced by the International Energy Agency and can be viewed at: http://www.iea.org/Textbase/country/maps/world/co2.htm

You will note that the United States and Chinese/Malaysian Industrial economies are the big releasers of CO2 on a global basis (that orange-ish color means a lot). The point which we have made is that this kind of information is only half or less of the story. The issue is what are we and they doing with the resources which we use to send this gas into the atmosphere? If we are an efficient user of energy and create more value in the world than most if not all other economies, we should be allocated the lion's share of energy to make sure very little of it is wasted. Trade should take care of distributing our stuff to other nations. With the value of the dollar, that makes it a bargain for most other economies.