Forward Contracting Recommended to Mitigate Extreme Hog Market Volatility

Aug 21, 2018

Hams Marketing Services is advising pork producers to consider forward contracting to mitigate the extreme volatility in the hog market.

A range of factors, primarily large slaughter hog numbers, the impact of tariffs on the cash market and now the impact of African swine fever in China on the futures market are causing huge shifts and a great deal of uncertainty.

Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk Management with h@ms Marketing Services, says the next six months will be one of those periods where producers are just trying to preserve capital and cut costs.

Tyler Fulton-h@ms Marketing Services:

Things are extremely tight and the move of the cash market over the course of the last three weeks or so has only exacerbated that situation.

I think the decline in the cash has happened a whole lot quicker than most people had anticipated and that's kind of sucking out some of the reserves that producers may have had.

So things are pretty tough.

The one recommendation that's probably out there right now is that, the market has actually recovered in some months close to 20 to 25 percent of their value over the last seven to ten days or so.

We think that actually represents a really good opportunity to hedge, just based on the fact that we think the heavy supply is going to be the certain aspect of this market and that there's still a great deal of uncertainty on the demand side.

Source : Farmscape

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.