The Math That Determines Whether You Make Weight Class
Every 4H swine exhibitor who has stood on the scale at fair weigh-in with a pig that came in twelve pounds light or eight pounds heavy knows the specific feeling of a project that didn't track the way it should have. The average daily gain calculation isn't complicated: goal weight minus current weight, divided by days remaining. But that number, run once at purchase and then forgotten until the month before the fair, doesn't tell you anything useful. Run once a week against the actual current weight, it tells you whether the pig is tracking, ahead, or behind — and gives you time to adjust the feed program before you're out of time.
The Required Average Gain calculated field in this template runs that math automatically every time you enter a current weight. On a summer morning when you've just weighed the pig and have 62 days until the Santa Barbara Fair, seeing "required average gain: 2.1 lbs/day" against a pig that has been gaining 1.8 lbs/day tells you the conversation you need to have with your project advisor about the feed ration before the gap becomes unclosable.
What the Expense Categories Actually Track
The Type of Purchase multichoice — Food, Dewormer, Tack, Pen and Shelter, Other Medicine, Cost of Pig — structures the expense record into the categories that matter for the 4H project record book, which is one of the core deliverables of a fair project alongside the animal itself.
Feed cost is the largest and most variable expense in a market hog project. A pig fed from 50 pounds to a target of 260 pounds is consuming roughly 700 to 750 pounds of feed, and the cost of that feed at local prices is the number that determines whether the project budget makes sense. Recording feed purchases with dates, amounts, and receipt photos creates the actual cost data rather than an estimate.
Dewormer and Other Medicine are the categories that establish the health record and the treatment timeline. A pig dewormed on entry and treated for mange at week 6 with documented product and dosage is a traceable health history. For USDA market programs and 4H record books, the withdrawal periods for any medications administered need to be documented against the fair date — which is exactly the calculation you can run when you have the treatment date in the record and the Days Until Fair calculated field visible alongside it.
Pen and Shelter costs are the startup capital that new exhibitors consistently underestimate. A first-year swine project family that doesn't track the pen construction, bedding, waterer, and feeder costs alongside the pig purchase doesn't have the full picture of what the project actually cost, which is the educational point of the 4H record book exercise.
The Record Book as the Real Output
The Receipt image field exists because 4H project record books require actual financial documentation. Taking a photo of each receipt at the time of purchase and attaching it to the expense entry is the habit that saves the panicked search through kitchen drawers in August when the record book deadline arrives and you need documentation for $840 in expenses spread across 14 purchases since April.
Health and Medical Notes as a free-text field per entry captures the observations that don't fit a checkbox: the pig was slightly off feed for two days after transportation, showed signs of respiratory stress during a heat event in July, coat condition improving after the second dewormer treatment. This is the observation log that makes a project demonstrably supervised and attentive, which is what 4H judges and record book evaluators are looking for when they assess whether the exhibitor engaged with the project as a learning experience.
Remaining Weight is the field you read at each weigh-in the way a coach reads a time gap. When it's shrinking at the right rate, the program is working. When it's not, something in the feed or health regimen needs to change before the distance becomes unclosable.