By Bruce Cochrane.
The Deputy Administrator with USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service expects changes to mandatory price reporting to take effect this fall.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has had a market news reporting function for over 100 years and has published information collected voluntarily from packers but, in 1999, for livestock and meat products, it became mandatory for processors to make prices available to USDA.
Dr. Craig Morris, the Deputy Administrator with USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, says today mandatory prices reporting covers live cattle, hogs and sheep, beef meat, pork meat, sheep meat and imported sheep meat.
Dr. Craig Morris-USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service:
Livestock mandatory reporting dates back again to, the first law was passed in 1999.
It's reauthorized every five years.
The last reauthorization was September 30 of 2015 and in that particular reauthorization Congress directed us to make a few direct final changes on the lamb side and then proposed some changes on both the lamb and swine side.
For swine there are really two major classes of proposed changes.
One will provide more depth to the data that we're publishing in our morning and afternoon hog report so that there's more trades that fall into those two reports.
That way, by having more data in there, that data is more representative of current market conditions.
The second change is creating new purchase type categories so that we can more discreetly publish the data that producers are seeing so that they understand better, for the different kinds of purchase types what's more representative of what they are doing so they understand the value of their particular livestock for the kind of sales or purchases that they are doing.
Dr. Morris notes the comment period on the proposed rule has closed and there were no comments in opposition to proposals on the swine side.
He says the final rule has been drafted and has been submitted for final reviews prior to publication which he is optimistic will happen and that it will be implemented by this fall.
Source: Farmscape