Critical Control Points: Managing Assets, Expenses and Leverage

Purdue University 1997 Swine Research Report. The first step in any knowledge-based evaluation of your operation is to understand your own system. Are you measuring production accurately? Are pigs accounted for accurately in each stage of production? Are all purchases and sales recorded and passed through farm record systems in a timely fashion? Do physical inventory counts reconcile with computer-generated numbers? How many adjustments and unrecorded deaths are necessary at the end of the month to reconcile records? Before making any judgments or comparisons, your own system needs to be as accurate as possible. In the past, one of the main concerns of consultants, both independent and those employed by the extension service, was to convince producers of the necessity of keeping good records. Those days are over. Today, an accurate set of production and financial records is expected in order to make any kind of rational decision concerning a swine operation. The challenge for producers is to use the data that is available from record-keeping systems to make good decisions.