Stochastic Analysis of Profitability of the Pig Breeding Process

Abstract

This study deals with the economy of agricultural production, specifically in animal farming. The main goal is to find and apply an efficient simulation model of pig breeding process in order to investigate the impact of various changes in the production settings on the economy of a particular pig breeding. For this reason, it is necessary to take values given in the study as model ones. Costs at particular parts of the breeding process were used as the main simulation inputs, together with number of parities, length of farrowing interval, number of weaned piglets depending on a parity number, lactation length, and the gestation length of sows. Additional inputs were price of produced piglets, price of insemination doses etc. Statistical distributions for the simulations of the inputs were obtained with theoretical curve fitting of sample data, which were provided from research projects focused on piglet production efficiency. The empirical distribution of sow profitability depending on the number of parities, which can help to decide about the culling of sows from the herd, was also determined in the research. A simulation was performed using the program @RISK. The obtained results and recommendations are discussed at the end of the paper.

Keywords

• simulation
• probability distribution
• pig breeding
• weaning of piglets
• culling of sows