By Bruce Cochrane.
The Director of Risk Management with h@ms Marketing Services credits the efforts of U.S. pork processors and producers for maintaining a smooth flow of hogs moving to slaughter during the holiday season.
The fourth quarter of 2016 saw surprisingly large numbers of live hog moving to slaughter in the U.S.
Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk Management with h@ms Marketing Services, says fourth quarter slaughter hog numbers were much higher than had been expected.
Tyler Fulton-h@ms Marketing Services:
I think expectations by pretty much anybody in the industry were that we'd see probably two to three percent more market hogs come to market.
What actually happened was something closer to about four and a half percent if not as high as six percent higher in some weeks over the course of the last three months.
Packers added shifts on Saturdays and even Sundays to keep the animals from backing up.
I would say that the producers probably did as much or more to maintain their currency.
Sometimes there's a tendency to want to hold back and wait for higher prices but producers were pretty intentional in making sure that they continued to market hogs on their planned schedules.
Even though there was significantly more than what we saw last year the industry was able to make it through and put up some weekly hog slaughters in the U.S. that exceeded 2.52 million hogs.
That was by far the largest that we've seen.
Fulton credits a counter seasonal rally in live hog prices that very few people expected to that currency.
He notes, over the last month, we've see prices come back quite substantially in spite of the fact that we've maintained slaughter levels at four to five percent larger than year ago levels.
Source: Farmscape