| Abomb - 3/4/2017 12:37 Usually me and dad can guess the load average within 5lbs .... but on the flip there's always those couple pigs way to light end up getting marked.
If you ever watched hogs go through a scale and tried to guess their weight before it showed up on the scale head you'd be shocked how hard it is to guess their weight within 5 lbs.
Guessing a trailer load within 5 lbs is doable, individual pigs not a chance.
About those light pigs, hogs at the packing plant get a number tattooed on them. The hanging carcasses are going past a guy sitting on a bar stool that types the number into a computer as the carcass goes over a scale. At 10,000 hd/8 hr shift there is a carcass going past that guy every 3 seconds. Not a chance that that guy is 100% accurate. We often have small carcasses on our kill sheets that our auto sort scale says did NOT get delivered to the packing plant with our load of hogs. When it happens on a load of marked and hand sorted hogs I blame it on us marking a small pig. When it happens on a load of hogs that was sorted by a computer and a scale I'm pretty sure the guy at the packing plant put typed the wrong number into the computer but there isn't any way to prove it.
Would I put up another building with auto sort? Not sure. Ideally, I'd put the barrows in auto sort barns and gilts in big pens. That's actually what we try to do now but due to building sizes and group sizes we have gilts in half of 1 of the auto sort barns.
|
Automating Hog Confinement Processes
