How to Get the Most Out of Feed
Author: Jim Long President – CEO Genesus Inc.
The world Swine industry has been traumatized over the last couple of years by record setting grain and oilseed prices which have significantly cut profits or have made financial losses in the swine industry. This very real situation has many hog producers looking at how to cut or lower their feed costs or improve feed conversion. Recently we came across what we believe is a very good article on this subject by Vern Pearson, PHD and Mariela Lachmann, PHD. The article as you will see lays out 20 major factors impacting Feed Conversion. We are in the Swine Genetic Industry and we hear about Feed Conversion every day. Of note their number 20 is Genetics with relatively little total impact. We agree with this as we see small variation in feed Conversion in the over 200 performance tested boars we do a week. Genetics has a much greater impact on litter size, growth and carcass. On the whole the aggregate of Health status has a much greater impact on feed conversion than specific genetics according to Pearson & Lachmann, PHDs.Markets
- US Hog prices are hovering around 80₵/lb. lean. Historically a good price, but with current feed prices calculates to us a per market hog loss farrow to finish of $25-30 per head.
- The latest weekly sow slaughter was 64,525. This is liquidation level. Te sow herd continues to shrink as we believe anything over 55-57,000 a week leads to a smaller sow herd.
- Summer lean futures are around $1.00/ea but we still expect cash will reach beyond this pushing closer to $1.10. A big reason is the USDA latest projection of total Red Meat & Poultry supply being down 2.4 billion pounds fro 2012, or 5 pounds less per capita. The way to ration less supply is higher prices. We had $1.00 lean hogs in 2012. Hard to believe less Red Meat and Poultry will not lead to higher hog prices in 2013.
Categorised in: Pork Commentary
This post was written by Genesus