Find and display most recent referencing entities
I've made an assumption about the way you want the table to be formatted, but something like the following should get you most of the way there:

// Set up the table.
$header = array('Factory Name', 'Field Value');
$rows = array();

// Get some nids for the factories you're interested in. Your real query will probably be more specific (checking status etc).
$args = array(':type' =&gt; 'factory');
$factory_nids = db_query('SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE type = :type', $args)-&gt;fetchCol();

// Load the factory nodes.
$factory_nodes = node_load_multiple($factory_nids);

foreach ($factory_nodes as $factory_node) {
  // Add the factory name to the first column of this row.
  $row = array($factory_node-&gt;title);

  // Get the latest measurement related to this factory with an EntityFieldQuery.
  // fieldCondition() and fieldOrderBy()/propertyOrderBy() are the important bits here.
  $query = new EntityFieldQuery();
  $query-&gt;entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
    -&gt;propertyCondition('type', 'measurement')
    -&gt;propertyCondition('status', 1)
    // This is the entity reference condition; entity ref fields use 'target_id' as the field column name.
    -&gt;fieldCondition('field_factory_reference', 'target_id', $factory_node-&gt;nid)
    // If the date you're interested in is in a field, use something like this...
    -&gt;fieldOrderBy('field_measurement_date', 'value', 'DESC')
    // ...or if you're interested in the node created date, this
    -&gt;propertyOrderBy('created', 'DESC')
    -&gt;range(0, 1);

  $results = $query-&gt;execute();

  // Make sure there are some results.
  if (!empty($results['node'])) {
    // EntityFieldQuerys always return an array of nids even if there's only one result, 
    // so it's easier to run through node_load_multiple and shift the element later
    $measurement_nodes = node_load_multiple(array_keys($results['node']));

    // Get the node
    $latest_measurement_node = array_shift($measurement_nodes);

    if ($field_items = field_get_items('node', $latest_measurement_node, 'field_some_field')) {
      // If we have an appropriate value, add it to the row.
      $row[] = $field_items[0]['value'];
    }
    else {
      $row[] = 'No data found';
    }
  }
  else {
    $row[] = 'No data found';
  }

  $rows[] = $row;
}

$rendered_table = theme('table', array('header' =&gt; $header, 'rows' =&gt; $rows));