As of June 1, the United States was home to 73.664 million hogs and pigs, down 0.04% from a year ago, and down 0.37% from last quarter’s inventory, and according to the latest Hogs and Pigs report published Thursday by the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Market hog inventory, at 67.784 million head, dipped 0.39% from last quarter, but was 0.053% ahead from the year prior. From the total June inventory, 5.880 million head were kept for breeding, down 0.20% from the March report and 1% from June 2025.
According to Lee Schulz, chief economist with Ever.Ag's Livestock Risk Management Team, the breeding herd is the lowest it has been since 2014, with a 69,000 head reduction from June 1, 2025.
“The last kind of peak in the breeding herd was back in 2019, and we've continued to see a smaller breeding herd. We obviously have some seasonality quarter to quarter, but the trend line has been a much smaller breeding herd since 2019,” Schulz says.
“Now, when we look at the sow slaughter, this is a leading indicator coming into a lot of these reports of what the size of that breeding herd would be. And when you look at sow slaughter, you can go back several quarters … to show that we've slaughtered fewer sows and it's really been at about a 5% decline year over year. That may get you to conclude that, well, the breeding herd should be larger, right? If we're culling and slaughtering fewer sows, that means that we're retaining those sows and maybe starting to stabilize and even starting to build the breeding herd back up. But keep in mind, we have fewer sows to cull from.”
For the under-50-pounds weight category, there were 21.106 million head, unchanged from the year prior. In the 50-to-119 pounds group, there were 19.071 million head, down 0.5% 2025.
In the 120-to-179-pounds group, there were 14.897 million head, down 0.5% from the year prior. Finally, for the 180-and-over group there were 12.710 million head, up 0.4% from 2025.
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