A note on breeding flock composition in relation to economic criteria

Abstract

Decisions on whether to cull or to retain for further production are of major importance in all classes of stock farming. Although there have been several studies relating flock composition to culling, reproduction and death rates, none of these have attempted to compare the profitability of various culling policies, their objective being only to show how flock composition and numbers of stock available for culling vary with variation in reproduction and death rates. Clearly, for given basic population parameters and a given framework of fixed farm resources, there should be a culling policy which is optimum for the particular farm. This note presents a linear programming model which can be used to determine the optimum culling policy for a Romney breeding flock.