Finding the "Missing Pig"

     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. 

     He noticed however a number written on all the sow cards which was not recorded in the computerized records.  He asked what it was and it turned out to be the days between mating and movement of the sow to gestation crates.  He hand recorded all of them and matched them to sow productivity and found that the ones below 28 days were correlated with the sows that were underperforming in terms of pigs produced.   

     When he examined all the numbers, the average days were around 30 but the distribution (variance) of the days was high.  He instituted a minimum hold of 30 days prior to moving and the farm found its "missing pig".

     I was discussing this with Dr. Rick Tubbs, who I have worked with extensively over the last 15 years and he reminded me we did a study many years ago regarding variation in the wean-to-service interval.  Looking at the relationship of farrowing rate and born alive to the WSI, we concluded that it was better to let sows which had not exhibited heat by day 7 post-farrowing to cycle again prior to breeding.  The improvement in farrowing rate and born alive more than compensated for the extra 21 non-productive days.  You would not discover this looking at your average WSI.

     This continues to illustrate the need to examine the variance of key metrics where it is possible to do.  The "opportunity" is often in the variance.