Crystal Levesque South Dakota State University

Publish Date: January 2, 2023

An effective swine marketing strategy can help maximize facility utilization and profits for the producer. Producers may choose to market animals on a fixed time or fixed weight basis. Considerations in the decision include the flow of pigs into a facility, the production goals such as final body weight and feed efficiency, the variability of the weights of animals in the facility, the availability of transportation for hogs from the facility, and shackle space at the packing plant. Producers in the U.S. typically market hogs over multiple events toward the end of the finisher period to reduce carcass weight variability. However, this depends on the accuracy of trained individuals sorting hogs and/or the use of automatic sorting technology such as sorting scales or machine learning.