With feed prices at or near all-time highs now is he time to look at how heavy you should market your pigs. Calculating your optimal market weight is a relatively straightforward exercise, once you have all the required information. Once set up, it is something that you should do on a monthly or quarterly basis that will help simplify the marketing process. Information you need includes carcass information, feed conversion, finisher diet cost and market hog price. You will need this information for different weight ranges throughout finishing. Once you have all the required data, the next step is to summarize the data, followed by calculating your margin over feed cost (MOFC). Weight classes that have the highest MOFC will be the weight classes you should be targeting to market your pigs. MOFC considers everything including market price, feed cost and grading results and show the net benefit across different weight classes.
Calculating MOFC is an important part of your marketing strategy. The greater volatility and fluctuations we see in hog and grain prices the more important MOFC becomes as your optimal market weight will change more frequently. It is easy to focus on individual pieces of the puzzle such as feed/hog price, index or premiums, but it is not until we look at them as a whole that we have the complete answer.
Now is the time to look at market weights (full article)
