How Many Meals in a Pig? -- Corrected

October 27, 2010 — 

Have you ever thought about how many meals are represented by every market hog under your care? Dr. Locke Karriker has (that's one of the benefits of tenure). He did some simple calculations (sorry Locke - I mean, "after extensive study and a day spent with a super collider super computer, Dr. Karriker derived an equation too complex to be understood by those of us outside of academia") and determined that every market hog provides 371 servings of pork! That's assuming a 265 pound market weight, 70% yield and an 8 ounce serving size (I know, I know the USDA says a serving size is only 4 ounces but come on let's get real). What this means is that every time you make a decision in a 1000 head finishing barn, you potentially impact more than 371,000 meals.

[Editor's note: In my attempt to convert the barn-based information Dr. Karriker supplied me into a per head basis I actually messed up the "complex" calculation necessary to convert pounds to ounces in the original version of this article and thus underestimated the number of meals per head. This is the corrected version and thanks to Dr. Karriker for his efforts to educate me. Also, thanks to everyone that has taken the time to let me know about the error -- at least I know someone's reading the e-Letter! My apologies to Dr. Karriker. Mea culpa, mea culpa!]