Agri Stats is a privately held company that provides professional benchmarking services to the commercial livestock industries. Currently, benchmarking services are provided for broiler, eggs, turkey, and swine production companies as well as their slaughtering and processing plants. Agri Stats started in the mid 1980\u2019s with broiler benchmarking services. There are now twenty-one international companies participating in Agri Stats with the majority of those located in Canada and South America. Agri Stats collects participant financial and production data electronically each month. Internal auditors convert the data, prepare it for comparison and perform the monthly audits. Each company\u2019s costs and financials are reconciled to their general ledger. Participants receive monthly detailed reports and performance summaries that allow them to compare their performance to other participants, the average of all companies and the top 25%. Current month, current quarter and previous twelve-month periods are reported. Each monthly report contains eight sections for analysis and comparison: Performance Summary, Feed Mill, Ingredient Purchasing, Nursery, Finishing, Market Haul and Profit. Benchmarking is simply the act of comparing data to improve performance. It can be and is done in various industries or in personal life. Businesses participate in formalized benchmarking to improve their performance, production and\/or products. One benefit of benchmarking is that it contributes to the ability to see outside personal or professional practices. Benchmarking helps open the window to allow visualization of what individuals, companies and\/or competitors are doing and how one compares to them. Effective benchmarking breaks this paradigm blindness and leads to creation of practices or processes that improve performance. Now that we realize the purpose and benefits of benchmarking, we should be able to agree upon its uses in the swine industry. In fact, it is used in various forms. These could range from simple production comparisons to elaborate and sophisticated total production and financial comparisons. Each and every commercial swine operation is encouraged to participate in some benchmarking effort; however, the ultimate goal is increasing profitability \u2013 not always increasing the level of production. Companies with higher feed costs\/ton made it in the Top 25% list by being efficient and having advantages in other areas. The bottom line take home message is that a swine production company or entity needs to be aware of their advantages and disadvantages so they may properly position strengths and allocate efforts for improvement. Current challenges facing the Canadian swine industry do not appear to be improving as evidenced by increasing cost disadvantages compared to the US. Canadian participants achieve higher production levels than their counterparts in the US but are more severely challenged with higher costs. Recent trends indicate the production gap may be reducing. This primarily is due to declines in Canadian production at the same time as US numbers have improved. Higher production levels do not guarantee lower costs. Swine production companies need to be able to measure their strengths and advantages in order to focus efforts on lowering costs and improving profitability. Benchmarking is an effective tool for identification of strengths and opportunities as well as measuring progress and trends. Each swine production company should be participating in some type of benchmarking. To gain maximum benefit, production, cost and financial performance should all be part of the benchmarking program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Agri Stats is a privately held company that provides professional benchmarking services to the commercial livestock industries. Currently, benchmarking services are provided for broiler, eggs, turkey, and swine production companies as well as their slaughtering and processing plants. Agri Stats started in the mid 1980\u2019s with broiler benchmarking services. There are now twenty-one international companies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[930],"tags":[22742,26665,6814,26957,8882,5651,23162,22311,16063,4564,6784,190,583,6815,4663,286,588,527,135,4598,6904,46,5108,2326,2455,18872,124,20007,14804,6492,2093,27247,10858,615,10859,14784,324,3465,63,16262,17743,27282,1498,1499,5667,5269,12242,6816,76,20912,10101,35,25952,16004,1131,16957,26313,24009,20911,21828,18011,19830,24548,2446,23560],"class_list":["post-4171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-production","tag-advantages-and-disadvantages-and-farrow-to-wean","tag-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-furrow-to-finish-swine-enterprise","tag-agri-stats","tag-agristats-swine","tag-al","tag-benchmarking","tag-benchmarking-swine","tag-bilbrey-and-swine-benchmark-data","tag-commercial-swine","tag-comparison","tag-cos","tag-cost","tag-costs","tag-data","tag-don","tag-dust","tag-economic","tag-efficiency","tag-egg","tag-electronic","tag-fee","tag-feed","tag-feed-cost","tag-feed-mill","tag-financial","tag-financial-benchmarking-swine","tag-finishing","tag-gh","tag-hal","tag-help","tag-ingredient","tag-list","tag-mark","tag-model","tag-nat","tag-ness","tag-nursery","tag-pea","tag-performance","tag-pl","tag-prod","tag-production","tag-productivity","tag-profitability","tag-relationship","tag-report","tag-service","tag-services","tag-slaughter","tag-some","tag-start","tag-swine","tag-swine-benchmarking","tag-swine-industry","tag-swine-production","tag-swine-production-benchmarking","tag-swine-production-class-tours","tag-swine-production-performance-comparison","tag-t","tag-top-25-swine-production-records-benchmarking","tag-tot","tag-total-production","tag-us-swine-operation-benchmarks","tag-variability","tag--aminolevulinic-acid-feed-additives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}