Enabling Profitable Farming with the Pork Profit Center Dashboard

In any farming enterprise, managing cost centers to minimize expenses while maximizing outputs is critical. However, livestock management can be challenging for even the most experienced farm owners and operators.

To help ensure profitable farming for your livestock enterprises, FBS Systems offers a Pork Profit Center Dashboard tool that creates opportunities for “real-time” monitoring, decision-making, and control over your livestock operation.

What are the key livestock opportunities that this agricultural technology resource helps you with? Some of the ways that the Pork Profit Center helps farmers are:

Optimizing Feeding with Closeout Feed Budgets

Managing livestock feeding schedules and monitoring deliveries is crucial for maximizing profits while minimizing costs in a livestock enterprise. The wean-to-finish stage is the primary profit center on a hog farm, but animal feed is a variable expense that doesn’t always scale on a neat 1:1 ratio.

Overfeeding high-priced rations can be a huge drain on your farm’s resources. But, without real-time and closeout data on how much of each ration has been fed on a per-head basis, it can be hard to identify wasteful feed use.

Creating a rationed feed budget for each phase of growth is a good start, but how do you know if that feed budget is being followed? With the Pork Profit Center Dashboard, you don’t have to guess or wait for groups to be closed.

Feed Budget reports in the dashboard give you a real-time picture of each group’s feed budget status—the total amount of feed consumed, the budgeted amount of feed on a per-head basis, the actual feed consumed per head, and the variance between your budget and your actual consumption, as seen below.

In this example, the Starter 3 ration was budgeted for 15 pounds per head, but the actual consumption was 101.24 pounds of feed per head—more than six and a half times the amount of feed that was budgeted for. This discrepancy could be due to a feed ordering mistake or a billing error.

Either way it’s very costly. Assuming Starter 3 is $.25 per pound and F1-F5 rations average $.10 per pound (a $.15 per pound cost differential) the 86.24 variance costs $13 per animal or $31,200 in a typical 2,400-head group.

Managing Livestock Mortality

Livestock health is a critical issue for profitable farming. Tracking livestock deaths and cumulative mortality rates can be an early warning sign of acute or chronic health issues in the herd.

The Pork Profit Center Dashboard provides mortality rate graphs.

In this chart, the mortality rate for the hogs being tracked remains mostly steady, but with sharp spikes on the fifth, ninth, twelfth, and eighteenth weeks. Spikes such as these could indicate a group being culled or a major event causing illness and/or injuries resulting in animal deaths over the course of several days.

By tracking mortality rates in real time and comparing them to scheduled livestock management activities, farmers can quickly find abnormalities and dig down into the information to find potential causes. Further tracking mortality by group can also be important for isolating environmental factors that might be affecting herd health.

Tracking Per-Head Animal Health Costs

When combined with cumulative animal mortality data, your animal health costs can be a highly effective early warning system. With this data, you can track which groups are having the highest health costs and mortality rates—which can be useful for determining if there’s a major livestock health issue that needs attention or if veterinary care is proving effective at managing livestock mortality rates.

Let’s compare two groups in the following table: 

In the example, Group A’s costs are tracking closely to projections while Group B’s costs are spiraling out of control.

If both groups are experiencing the same mortality rates, then you would want to more closely examine what that additional healthcare spending was being used on. This would be an important step in minimizing livestock production costs for your farm by identifying potential waste or ongoing health issues that may require the culling of a group to limit potential risk to the rest of the herd.

Getting More from Livestock Sales

Selling livestock as a commodity product can be incredibly difficult. To maximize per-load profits, shipment scheduling and sorting crews need to have access to immediate feedback on how accurately they’re sorting animals to meet the packing plant’s target weights.

Here’s a comparison of two loads of hogs from the same group being sent on the same day with almost identical average weights, but with different earnings.

Load A (Cut 7) didn’t earn a premium because the wide distribution of live weights varied from under 170 pounds to as high as 350 pounds. The standard deviation for this load of hogs was 29.48 pounds.

Load B (Cut 8) earned a premium worth $867.11 because it was more tightly sorted and had a smaller standard deviation of 18 pounds. In a tight commodity market, monitored sorting like this can make the difference between profit and loss for a group.

In addition to analyzing individual loads of hogs, the Pork Profit Center Dashboard can track trends in sales weights in real time. Compare groups, locations, and growers with a convenient mobile app view:

This data tracking for your livestock enterprise helps you discover abnormalities in your standard deviation for a load. Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts help you identify trends, spot emergent problems, and find a path to continuous improvement in your livestock management.

Stay in the know about when you can expect to earn premiums and who is most diligently adhering to target weights and effectively managing deviations.

Managing Livestock Environments

In future iterations of FBS Systems farm ERP solution, you’ll also have access to livestock environment information. Tracking environmental settings for your pens helps you identify abnormalities that could affect hog health. 

For example, is the temperature in the pen rising due to a heat wave or falling too much during the winter? Tracking in-pen temperatures can help you optimize your use of climate control systems to keep your livestock in optimal health.

While not connected to a profit center dashboard (yet), most environment control systems are able to separately monitor and control temperature, water, and ventilation for your climate-controlled livestock habitats. FBS will incorporate the true cost tradeoffs for those environmental settings.

Get the Pork Profit Center Dashboard

Are you looking to maximize profitability for your livestock enterprise and more effectively manage your farm’s cost centers? Our ag tech solutions are designed by farmers, for farmers to help you improve profits while saving time and effort.

Reach out to FBS Systems now to get started! Schedule a demonstration of the software by calling 800.437.7638 or emailing sales@fbssystems.com.