"You don’t know what you don’t know if you’re not tracking it and if you’re not monitoring it," says Brad Eckberg, business analyst at MetaFarms, Inc.
That’s one of the reasons why the U.S. pork industry benchmarking effort started up years ago, when National Pork Board’s (then) Animal Science Committee recognized a need to have publicly available information for producers and other interested stakeholders.
"We saw how other countries, particularly Denmark and Australia, had publicly available data for their producers," explains Chris Hostetler, director of animal science of the National Pork Board. "We wanted to provide that same opportunity for U.S. pork producers to gauge their progress against the top 10%, the average and the bottom 10% of the industry, so they could see where they fall and which areas they’re doing well in and areas they need to focus more resources on."
Hostetler says the major difference between the top 10% and the bottom 10% in almost every category is pretty revealing and can help researchers identify areas where work is needed.
"The top 10% gives us a gauge for what is attainable and the bottom 10% give us a gauge for the amount of progress that needs to be made," Hostetler says.
Read more at Farm Journal’s Pork.
[Source: Farm Journal’s Pork 18 July 2022]