image courtesy of www.clintonnc.com
Deconstructing the USDA’s Hog Report
The USDA released a report last month titled “Trends and Developments in Hog Manure Management: 1998-2009”. While trends in manure management are important and interesting, I found the industry’s production stats to be much more intriguing.
First, a little overview of the report. The analysis spans the eleven year period from ‘98 to ‘09. It includes farms having more than 25 pigs at any time during the year. To give you some perspective, with just a few sows and one boar a farmer could get well beyond 25 pigs on the farm at any given time. 25 hogs is about what you’d get from one sow in a year if you pushed her (3 litters, 8 per litter). So this study includes the very small to the very large. The survey represents more than 90% of all hog inventory in the representative years.