Pork: Cost of production and performance

A robust KPI provides a direct indication of business efficiency, sustainability, and profitability, the elements critical for success.

Financial KPIs show if your business is profitable, and are the most important as they are linked to all other KPIs as they all have costs associated with them. Financial KPIs can be a measure of how much it costs to produce each kg of pork you produce on farm.

This section provides estimates of the cost of pig production in GB.

Technical performance also provide KPIs that impact on your business. This section contains latest physical performance data for the national GB pig herd, covering both indoor and outdoor breeding herds and the feeding herd.

Each farm must budget and plan for what is best for their own circumstances and resources.

Productivity: Fertility includes measures such as pigs weaned per sow per year or pigs weaned per pen. The measures provide a straightforward indicator of the business viability as, without fertility, there would be no viable business. However, it is possible to maximise fertility at the cost of profitability, so fertility should always be compared to your financial KPIs. An example may be whether to keep an indoor or outdoor production system.

Survivability: Health and welfare KPIs can be a measure of how much medicine is required to produce each kg of pork, or the percentage of mortality. Medicine usage is a good indicator of the effectiveness of health and welfare across your enterprise, and a high use tends to indicate issues with diseases and welfare. Mortality rates shown on this website are the % of pigs lost that were alive at the beginning of that stage of production. Pre-weaning mortality is the % of piglets that were born alive and die before weaning; rearing mortality is the % of live piglets that entered the rearing stage and died before moving to finishing; finishing mortality is the % of live piglets that entered the finishing stage and died before slaughter.

Yield – FCR and DLWG: The key to measuring yield KPIs is weighing stock. There are key points that lend themselves to gathering weight data more than others. The usual measures are daily liveweight gain (DLWG) and a measure of the efficiency of feed converted into weight (FCR)

International comparisons of production costs and physical performance can be found in the annual 'Cost of Production in Selected Countries' InterPIG reports. They provide a snapshot of UK performance against other countries we compete with in a global market.