The Director of Risk Management with hams Marketing Services says lower than projected slaughter hog supplies have helped maintain steady live hog prices.
Over the past couple of years the largest hog slaughter in the U.S. has come in mid to late December.
Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk Management with hams Marketing Services, says if we use that as a guide we can expect U.S. hog slaughter to push up to the high 2.55 or even to 2.6 million hogs in which case we would expect to see some pressure in the cash market.
We’ve not seen the increase in hog slaughter that we anticipated from the last USDA Hogs and Pigs Report. That report was put out about two and a half months ago, and since that time, the hog slaughter has lagged what was expected.
Generally we anticipated about three and a half to four percent more hogs than we saw last year at this time and really that number has failed to measure up. In fact it’s been running closer to about two percent with a fair amount of variability.
Recently those numbers have been pretty close. Last week for example was about 3.6 percent higher but that’s something that we’re monitoring quite closely because, with the new plants that come on stream, it might be that we see increased competition for those hogs narrowing up packer margins and resulting in a better profit environment for producers than we would have thought otherwise.
~ Tyler Fulton, h@ms Marketing Services
Fulton says, as it stands right now, the cash market is holding steady as are wholesale pork prices. He says there’s a little bit of variation by cut but for the most part wholesale pork prices are holding steady and packers so far have been willing to give what they get on the wholesale pork side.
