Introduction
The following checklist of cost saving and revenue generating ideas focuses on immediate payback with minimal or no investment in capital improvements. It is understood that changes to breeding herd management, health status and equipment purchases such as wet/dry feeders would add further to the potential savings but because of their longer-term or strategic role in your business are considered fixed for the present discussion.

Feed budgeting
Most feeding programs today are based on a feed budget – or should be. Fundamentally, a feed budget defines the performance expected on a particular farm and builds a feeding program designed to achieve it. In its simplest form, a feed budget defines the quantity of each diet to be fed to each pig and the cost of that diet. A feed budget can therefore be used to monitor actual – as opposed to expected – feed usage. Both functions – feeding program development and monitoring of results – can be extremely valuable to the individual producer.

Typically, certain assumptions have to be made with respect to feed intake, expected performance and variation in performance before specific diets can be formulated. Nonetheless, the development of a feed budget makes the feeding program farm specific and also lays out the basis for expected results. In terms of “surviving tough times,” the feed budget can help out in numerous ways.

A feed budget provides a foundation of expected performance. Actual measures of performance can be measured and compared with the expectations. If there is a shortfall in performance, corrective action can be taken. One might either alter the feed budget to reflect the reality of animal performance, or take action to address the shortfall in performance. Figure 1 illustrates the results of tracking a feed budget in a nursery and determining that insufficient quantities of the Phase 1 starter were being used. When the correction was made, the performance of the pigs, in terms of nursery exit weights, was profound. Nursery exit weight increased from 30.3 kg to 33.2 kg.