Production Efficiency of Specialized Swine Producers

This research provides an efficiency evaluation of swine firms by specialization type providing estimates of technical, allocative, scale, and overall efficiency separately for farrow-to-finish, farrow-to-feeder, feeder-to-finish, farrow-to-weanling, and weanling-to-feeder operations. Results indicate variation in efficiency measures both across and within operation specializations. This suggests optimal adjustments for enhancing efficiency may not be homogeneous across the industry and may vary across specializations. The analysis also implies that future analyses of the swine industry must carefully and individually consider the diverse specializations comprising the industry. These findings are important in further understanding the rapid change occurring in the swine industry in the form of increased production specialization.