By Erin Little, Director of FarmStats for Pipestone Business Services
Swine production systems inherently have variation or deviate from the average. Differences in mortality, growth rate, feed efficiency and market outcomes exist even when pigs are managed under the same general protocols. The goal of performance improvement is not to eliminate variation but to understand it, manage it and use it to improve the overall system.
Individual closeouts provide valuable information about what happened in a single group, but on their own, they lack context to accurately evaluate system performance. A poor‑performing group may be influenced by a short‑term health challenge, while an exceptional group may benefit from favorable conditions that are not repeatable. Benchmarking aggregates many closeouts over time, turning isolated outcomes into patterns. This allows producers to identify repeated successes and what attributes repeat themselves. The same for repeatedly poor health groups – identifying commonalities educates a producer on their system limitations.
Disease rarely presents as a single, uniform event across a system. Its impact is shaped by age of pig, previous health status and day-to-day management. Benchmarking allows producers to evaluate how consistently health pressure affects performance, identify where resilience exists and focus improvement efforts on repeatable weaknesses rather than isolated outcomes.
Internal Vs. External Benchmarking
Internal benchmarking shows differences between barns, caretakers, pig sources, wean ages, health status and many more. This analysis allows producers to identify impactful characteristics. When lower‑performing groups repeatedly align with certain health attributes, those patterns signal real opportunities for intervention. Importantly, internal benchmarks show that top‑performing groups are not anomalies; they demonstrate what is biologically achievable under the system’s existing constraints.
External benchmarking adds another critical layer by setting expectations. Comparing performance against a large population of similar producers helps answer an essential question: are current results being limited by avoidable or unavoidable health challenges and is there unrealized potential for improvement? When producers see that peers with comparable health status are consistently achieving better outcomes in metrics such as percent tops or average daily gain, it reframes animal health from a fixed constraint into a manageable lever. External benchmarks help ensure that health‑related performance targets are both realistic and competitive.
A Strategic Driver
Animal health has a direct economic impact that benchmarking helps quantify. Health challenges influence feed cost per pound of gain through reduced growth rate and feed consumed by pigs that do not reach market. They also affect mortality, uniformity and market timing. Benchmarking translates these biological effects into economic terms, allowing producers to prioritize health interventions based on financial impact rather than perception alone.
Ultimately, benchmarking supports better animal health management by reducing overreaction and improving focus. Rather than making system‑wide changes based on a single bad closeout, producers can rely on aggregated data to identify repeat issues, examine targeted adjustments and measure results over time. Benchmarking does not replace production expertise or on‑farm observation; it complements them by providing the context needed to make confident, data‑driven decisions. When used effectively, benchmarking turns animal health from a source of uncertainty into a strategic driver of improved performance and profitability.
