Optimal Delivery of Pigs to the Abattoir

Lluís M. Plà-Aragonés and Sara V. Rodríguez-Sánchez
Additional contact information
Lluís M. Plà-Aragonés: University of Lleida
Sara V. Rodríguez-Sánchez: Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon

Chapter Chapter 17 in Handbook of Operations Research in Agriculture and the Agri-Food Industry, 2015, pp 381-395 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Pig farmers depend on the income they get from the delivering of fattened pigs to the abattoir. Pigs are fattened in batches and all-in-all-out management strategy is common in commercial farms. This chapter presents a mixed-integer linear programming model describing a fattening pig unit delivering pigs to the same abattoir. The interest of the model is mainly to maximise the revenue from deliveries of pigs to the abattoir that pays according to a carcass classification. Carcass classification is affected by the heterogeneous growth of animals determining the weight and body composition (percent of fat and/or lean) changing over time. The delivery of all pigs of a batch at a time is shown to be less profitable than two or three within a time window of around 4 weeks. Our contribution corroborates the findings of past studies and demonstrates the benefit of homogeneous weights. It is also shown how a time window of 4 weeks delivering animals to the abattoir is optimal. However, the optimal result per batch does not correspond to the optimal result per day. The latter would imply saving 1 week in the marketing time window and increments of 5 % in the daily or annual revenue.

Keywords: Optimal slaughtering; Pig production; Pig management transport planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:isochp:978-1-4939-2483-7_17

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9781493924837

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4939-2483-7_17

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Series in Operations Research & Management Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().