First and foremost, you are a farmer. But a farm is also a business; you need to turn a profit and manage it so profits continue to grow efficiently. Being a farmer is a tough job and while it’s easy to just focus on livestock and farm practices, you also need to be skilled at business and farm efficiency.
Keep reading to find out exactly how you can improve efficiency on your pig farm.
Keep careful records
Start by highlighting areas where efficiency can be improved. To do that you’ll need to keep careful records to analyse. Look at income and expenditure on your pig farm as well as things like animal health, market prices, competition in the local area etc.
By getting into the habit of recording all this data, you can easily spot where money is disappearing faster than it should. You’ll also be able to see where you are slowing down. You’ll be able to see which machines break down the fastest and which other farms are doing better than you.
This is a simple business tip that everyone running a business should be following, even pig farmers. Record and analyse. You can use a spreadsheet or if you want to go really high tech (and you have the budget for it) you can hire experts or specialist software to record and analyse the data for you.
You can apply this to very specific areas of pig farming. Feeding for example. You might find that delivering food to your livestock is often slow and could be improved upon. So, try out a few different feeders, record the data on how they improve efficiency on your farm, then compare to see which is best.
Use the latest tech
It’s not just feeders that can be changed to improve efficiency on your farm. There are lots of new, technological products available on the market that can help boost profits and efficiency. A lot of it comes down to something called precision agriculture: using very precise methods and data analysis to improve efficiency on your farm.
There are many large farm machinery companies offering innovative solutions to improve your farm. Just look at the newest range of tractors and attachments from John Deere, for example. For pig farm specific tech, however, you’ll find that the market is considerably narrower. I’ve done some research of my own and found that the best place you can go for pig farm technology is Skiold. They have some very interesting projects and products that you might find very useful on your pig farm, even on a small budget.
You can find out more by looking at www.skiold.com/.