Pig farm software that puts feed cost against sale weight

Feed is the whole business

A weaner costs about 180,000 and will eat something near 350,000 worth of feed before it is ready for the butcher. Drugs, bedding and the boy who cleans the sty matter, but they are small change beside the feed bill.

The trouble is that feed is bought the way it is eaten: continuously, in small amounts, from several suppliers, at prices that move. By month three nobody is counting bags, so the cost of a pig is felt rather than known — and a butcher's offer of 600,000 for a big animal always sounds like a good day.

PesaScope adds the bags up. Each one is an expense with a date; each pig that leaves is a sale with kilos and a rate; and the difference across the batch's months is what the batch actually did.

How a batch is recorded

1. Record the weaners inWhat you paid, how many, and the date. That is the batch's starting line and the figure every later cost sits on top of.
2. Record every bag of feed on the dayGrower mash, sow and weaner mash, brewers' waste, swill you pay for. Give feed its own expense category so it can be read on its own line.
3. Sell by weight, not by eyeSet the pig up in kilos with a price per kilo, then enter the weight as the quantity. The sale then records the way the butcher actually bought it.
4. Read the batch windowRun the report from the day the weaners arrived to the day the last one left. Takings minus everything spent in between is the batch's result.

What a pig farm sells

Pick "Pig farm" at sign-up and this list is already there, and it is what makes a sale two taps instead of a note in a book.

Feeds sit in the list so bags can be recorded as purchases. Boar service is set up as a service, because there is nothing to count in stock.

Ten fatteners, five months

Feed is 58% of everything the batch cost. Spread over the 765 kg that actually left the farm, the pigs cost about 7,930 a kilo to raise — so a butcher offering 7,500 is offering a loss of roughly 330,000, and it will still feel like a good day because 5.7 million arrives in cash.

There is no herd register

PesaScope holds no livestock records. There is no card per sow, no farrowing date, no service or vaccination history, no litter count and no weight log. If you keep those, keep them in the book you already use — the app will not replace it.

What it holds is the money and the movement: what the weaners cost, what feed cost, what left the farm, at what weight and at what price. On most farms that is the missing half, because the breeding notes usually exist somewhere and the cost arithmetic usually does not exist at all.

The one habit worth adding is putting a weight on every sale. Once kilos are in the record, "we got 9,000 a kilo" stops being a claim and becomes something you can hold against the last batch and the batch before that.

Where a pig farm leaks money

1. Feeding past the profitNine pigs eat roughly 810,000 in a sixth month and put on perhaps eight kilos each — 72 kg, worth about 648,000. Holding for a bigger pig can cost more than the pig gains.
2. Buying feed one bag at a timeRetail-by-the-bag is the dearest way to buy. With every purchase recorded, the price you paid per bag across the cycle is visible, and so is the week it started climbing.
3. Sows that have stopped earningA dry sow eats all year and pays only through litters. PesaScope will not flag her, but putting breeding-stock feed in its own expense category keeps that cost from hiding inside the batch.
4. Selling by appearanceA pig sold "for 600,000" with no weight recorded cannot be compared with anything. With the kilos in, a poor rate shows up the same day.

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