The 7 KPIs Every Commercial Pig Farm Should Track Weekly

There is a pattern in every top-quartile pig operation I have audited: a single A4 sheet, on the manager's desk, refreshed every Monday.

On that sheet are seven numbers. Not twenty. Not three. Seven — each with a target, an actual, and an arrow.

The difference between a top-decile farm and an average one rarely comes from one big decision. It comes from watching the right indicators every week and acting on the small drifts before they compound.

Monthly reporting is too slow for pig production. A finishing batch turns in 16–18 weeks; a four-week reporting lag is a quarter of the cycle gone.

By the time a performance problem appears in the monthly accounts, the farm has already paid for it in extra feed, in higher mortality, and in missed market weights that cannot be recovered.

A weekly KPI cadence shrinks the management feedback loop from 30 days to 7. Over a year that compounds into roughly four times more opportunities to course-correct.

It also creates a shared language between the owner, the manager, the nutritionist and the vet. Every conversation starts from the same dashboard, in the same units, with the same definitions.

Farms that institute a weekly KPI review typically see 0.1–0.2 improvement in FCR and 30–60 g/day improvement in ADG within two production cycles — entirely from faster reaction time, before any genetics or nutrition changes.

Track a tight group of seven KPIs that, together, describe productivity, efficiency, herd health and reproduction. More than seven and the dashboard becomes wallpaper.

Productivity: Average Daily Gain (ADG, g/day). Benchmark for commercial finishing: 850–950 g/day.

Efficiency: Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR, kg feed/kg gain). Benchmark for finishing: 2.5–2.8.

Intake control: Feed Intake (kg/pig/day). Drives both ADG and FCR; deviations of >5% from expected are an early warning of water, ventilation or health issues.

Herd health: Mortality Rate (%) by phase. Benchmark: <2% nursery, <3% finishing.

Reproduction: Piglets Born Alive per litter (target 13–14), Farrowing Rate (%) (target >85%), and Non-Productive Sow Days (target <40 days/sow/year).

Every KPI needs three columns: target, actual, and a 4-week trend line. The trend is more important than the single-week value, because it reveals direction.

A 500-sow farrow-to-finish operation reviews its weekly dashboard every Monday at 08:30.

Over three consecutive weeks, finisher FCR drifts from 2.6 to 2.7 to 2.8, while ADG falls from 920 g/day to 880 to 860. The aggregate finishing numbers for the month would still look 'within range'.

Because the trend was visible in week two, the team investigates feeder calibration and water flow before reformulating the ration. They find one wing of feeders set 8% too generous, producing waste, and a water line restriction on the second row.

Fixes cost $400 in labour and parts. Performance recovers within ten days.

Without the weekly cadence, the same issue would have appeared two months later as a $9,000 margin shortfall on the batch, with no obvious cause and a far harder root-cause analysis.

• Lock in the seven KPIs above; resist the temptation to add 'just one more'. Discipline is the differentiator.
• Set a written target and red/amber/green thresholds for each KPI, signed off by the owner and the manager together.
• Hold a 30-minute Monday review with the production team. No slides, no narrative — just the dashboard and the trend lines.
• Tie one named corrective action to every red KPI, with an owner and a due date by the end of the meeting.
• Publish the dashboard where staff can see it — barn office, WhatsApp group, or printed sheet. Visibility creates accountability.
• Review the targets themselves quarterly against industry benchmarks, and revise them upward as the herd improves.
• Audit data quality at least once a month: sample five barn records against the dashboard and reconcile any discrepancy.

You cannot improve what you do not measure, and you cannot react to what you measure too slowly. A weekly review of seven well-chosen KPIs is the cheapest performance-improvement programme in modern pig production.