I had an opportunity to spend some time at VION, one of the largest food companies in the EU and one of the largest slaughterhouses for pigs due to recent expansions by merger and acquisiton. They provide a website for their producers which gives a tremendous amount of very valuable information regarding their performance. From the website the producer can download their individual animal kill stats as well as benchmark against the plant average and top performing farms. In addition, they are provided information about lung health for instance and can also benchmark that against the plant.
This is extremely valuable information for the savvy producer as it allows them to understand the variance of performance vs. the average and allows them to plan strategies more effectively for increasing revenue and decreasing cost through control of variation and quality.
After that meeting I met with about 10 veterinarians who work with swine producers throughout the Netherlands. As we were discussing this, it came to light that the role of the veterinarian in Europe is often much different than in the U.S. (with Spain possibly being the exception). Vets in the EU are more constrained to "bugs and drugs" and traditionally have not brought financial or production/expansion etc. advice. The typical producer is probably smaller than the U.S. with about 300-500 sows.
I encouraged them to take on more of this role for the reasons Al Leman championed the same in the U.S. over 15 years ago. The vet is the key observer of the herd, present more often than any other vendor or consultant and will have much more intimate knowledge of the dynamics of the herd than will the accountant or the banker for instance. Some of them were eager to do it and are going to give it more of a try but there is some reluctance to change the traditions among producers even though producers themselves get together regularly in groups to compare performance and share ideas.
They are facing a similar situation as the U.S. now in terms of losses, and perhaps greater due to the somewhat higher cost of feed and the inability to move product into export markets as freely because of the Dollar/Euro relative value.
In this country we have a tremendous group of highly versatile and skilled consulting veterinarians but many packers that cannot or will not provide anything more than "kill sheets" (which I refer to as receipts rather than useful data). There are a couple of notable exceptions. In the EU they have the information but not the skilled, multi-dimensional consultants to assist in using it effectively.
There is a tremendous competitive advantage available for the producers who can put all of that together and use it effectively. I believe it is the next competitive leap forward and some here in the U.S. are making very interesting headway with it, but not very many yet.
