Peer benchmarking
Useful comparison, without exposing anybody
A benchmark is only worth having if the farms in it are genuinely comparable, and only worth participating in if it cannot be reverse-engineered back to a named producer. Both of those are engineering problems, and we treated them as such.
How a cohort is built
Like for like, before anything is averaged
Comparing a 30-week caged Hy-Line W-36 flock in January against a 70-week cage-free brown flock in July tells you nothing. Cohorts are filtered first.
Genetics
Breeder strain, resolved through an alias list so “H&N” and “H&N Nick Chick” land in the same cohort.
Flock age
Grouped into age bands so a week-34 flock is compared against flocks at a comparable stage.
Production type
Caged, enriched, cage-free, free-range and pasture operations are not pooled together.
Season
Environmental load differs enough through the year to matter.
Age banding, season definition, cohort weighting and outlier handling are being finalised with our nutrition team. They are configuration rather than assumptions baked into code, and every benchmark records the definition that produced it — so a report generated today still means the same thing in two years.
Privacy by construction
Four rules that make the benchmark safe to join
A minimum of ten eligible flocks
Below that, the peer figures are suppressed and the screen explains why rather than showing a thin, misleading number. Genetic standards stay visible, so the comparison is never empty.
The threshold is re-checked after every filter
Otherwise a cohort could be narrowed one filter at a time until only one recognisable farm remained. Each additional filter is re-evaluated against the threshold, not just the first.
Consent belongs to the company, and is versioned
Not to a user, and not to a farm profile. It records who decided, when, and against which version of the terms — and it can be withdrawn.
No named peers, ever
Producers see cohort statistics: average, median, a direction-aware top-performer figure, and the number of flocks behind them. Never an individual line belonging to somebody else.
Direction matters
“Top performer” has to mean best, not highest
A naive ninetieth percentile rewards the highest number. For half the metrics on a layer farm, the highest number is the worst outcome.
| Metric | Better is |
|---|---|
| Hen-day production | Higher |
| Hen-housed production | Higher |
| Weekly mortality | Lower |
| Cumulative mortality | Lower |
| Feed per dozen | Lower, within a viable range |
| Average egg weight | A target band, not an extreme |
Egg weight is the interesting case: neither the smallest nor the largest eggs are the goal, so a percentile is the wrong tool entirely. Metrics like that are handled as a target band, and the rule for each one is set by our nutrition team rather than inferred from the data.
Common questions