A partner with Polar Pork Farms suggests, despite feed costs that are more than double those of one year ago, the outlook for North American pork producers for 2022 looks encouraging.
The global supply of pork is expected to be down in 2022.
Florian Possberg, a partner with Polar Pork Farms, says in October alone China lost 1.2 million sows, equivalent to almost the entire Canadian inventory, from last December to June the European Union lost 250 thousand sows and hog numbers have also been down in the United States.
In our back door here, our four-dollar barley a year ago is now over nine dollars and five and a half or six-dollar wheat is 11 dollars plus. That’s our number one cost and globally feed costs have doubled or maybe even more. So, while prices have been under stress in some areas, the cost of producing hogs went up substantially, mainly because of feed costs.
Our hog price right now is probably somewhere close to what it was a year ago but we did enjoy good prices during the summer. That was different in places like China and the European Union and so those producers are going to be smarting a little and so they are going to need to see significant profits before they really rebound.
We in Canada really didn’t drop our production very much at all and we should be in a position to be OK in 2022 and maybe even into 2023 for a period.
~ Florian Possberg, Polar Pork Farms
Other than China, which may expand rapidly if they get significant profits, Possberg doesn’t foresee a great deal of sow herd expansion in any other part of the world.
