By Ben Allen – CEO, BinSentry
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” is classic advice often attributed to management guru Peter Drucker.
But how do you measure what you can’t see, or even know if you’re measuring the right thing in the first place?
For decades, the swine and poultry sectors were blind to a major cause of feed outages that led to higher feed conversion ratios (FCR) and lower profits.
That’s because the industry had practically no visibility into the supply chain and no reliable way to monitor feed bin inventories in real-time and predict future needs.
Until now. BinSentry technology has changed all that.
That’s not an empty boast — we’ve got the science to back it up.
BinSentry’s research collaboration with pork industry leader HANOR found the vast majority of animal feed outages are caused by bin slide management errors — not running out of feed on site.
This previously invisible problem increased feed conversion ratios (FCR) in HANOR barns by as much as 7 basis points.
Why does that matter?
For HANOR, where one point of feed conversion is worth about 30 cents per head, improving FCR by up to 7 points translates into $2.10 per head or $2 million.
What is FCR?
FCR is the conventional way to measure animal protein production efficiency. It refers to the amount of feed eaten by a chicken or hog or other animal divided by the amount of weight it gains. Lower FCR values indicate greater efficiency.
Feed is every producer’s biggest expense, representing 60-70 percent of the cost of raising an animal. To achieve optimal growth and performance, animals need a constant supply of feed. So, whenever that feed flow is interrupted it can lead to growth delays, increased mortality and other health issues — all of which impact FCR.
We’ve always known that FCR is a critical metric that impacts profitability. However, prior to the Hanor study, nobody had been able to demonstrate a clear, definitive correlation between feed outages and higher FCR scores.
A whole new category of feed outages: bin slide management errors
The study took place over 15 months between 2022 and 2023, BinSentry installed some 200 sensors on feed bins across 28 HANOR sites and 100 barns housing 195 groups totalling 234,000 finishing pigs.
The researchers found that groups that experienced outages lasting 24 hours or longer lost about seven points of FCR. They also found that about 70 to 80 percent of the out-of-feed events they tracked were not due to running out of feed on-site, but caused by mistakes in managing the manual slides on tandem feed bins.
The results demonstrated — for the first time anywhere — a whole new category of feed outages and a measurable correlation between out-of-feed events, FCR and the bottom line of producers.
Here’s a quick summary of what our study found:
- Mistakes in managing feed bin slides — leaving slides closed — account for nearly 80% of all out-of-feed events
- Only 20% of feed outages are caused by actually running out of feed on site
- Being able to see and address feed outages improved FCR by up to 7 basis points, which translates into $2.10 per head or $2 million a year for Hanor.
This is game-changing information because before now, the industry was unable to find a direct correlation between outages and FCR.
As it turns out, feed outage hours have been massively underreported. We were missing 80 percent of the problem because we had no reliable way to see what was going on inside the feed bins.
According to HANOR’s COO Jim Moody:
“That’s a huge financial implication we were able to get corrected. The important piece is that we can now measure the problem – and if we can measure it, we can improve it.”
To learn more about the HANOR study, check out the story in PigCHAMP’s Benchmark Magazine.
Or – contact us to find out how BinSentry can help lower FCR, increase efficiency, improve animal health and performance, and enhance workplace safety across your operations.
