maximizing profits

While there are definitely places to cut costs in your business (and we will be looking at several candidates), a key mistake made in lean times is relying almost exclusively on cost cutting within existing processes, often damaging both short and long-term profits, alientating employees and risking increasing overall costs to eventually "reverse" these poor decisions.

So we begin our series by looking at some of the over-arching principles that should guide your approach at maintaining and improving profits during times of low returns. We will look at these things in general terms first and then get very specific about how to increase your chance at profit improvement.

     Most producers that have farrow to finish operations of any size, have made some calculations, usually based on some rule of thumb to decide how many nursery and finisher spaces they need (or wean-to-finish spaces).  Implicit or perhaps even explicit in this choice is a stocking density and anticipated productivity of the sow herd.  Most rules of thumb assign so many "turns" to the facility and back calculate the number of spaces needed by weekly flow expectation from the sow herd.

     We would expect this to be in flux over time since average sow herd productivity has been rising and changes like movement to wean-to-finish, disease eradication (where successful), season of the year and changes in lactation length all conspire to make flow predictions a little difficult.  Here again, most producers take up the slack with stocking density and sometimes even early marketing out of finishers to free up space.