Ponto ideal de abate de um suíno

Abstract

Pig farming in the southern region accounts for more than half of Brazilian production and constitutes a significant part of economic activities in western Santa Catarina. Such performance was achieved with the improvement of matrices, feeding, handling and industrialization, the result of scientific and technological research. The present work is part of this theme, with the objective of elaborating a mathematical model based on real data, to determine the optimal moment of slaughter of pigs, from the point of view of the economic yield for the producer. The variables of mass, market price of the kilogram of live pigs, consumption and market price of feed were monitored for 178 days in a family pig breeding enterprise. To obtain the mass of the animals, commercial scales and a popular metric evaluation method were used. Different functions were analyzed to express the variables involved and two general models were elaborated to evaluate the ideal slaughter time: the logistic model and the polynomial. The parabolic model proved to be efficient only to determine the day when the activity starts to make a profit. The ideal slaughter time calculated by the logistic model was around the 237 day of life, considering the data collected. Both models can assist producers and industry technicians in making decisions on the topic and also in Math classes in high school (parabolic model) and in higher education (logistic model) as material for applying Mathematics.