On Wednesday the joint US and Canadian quarterly hog inventory report was released by USDA and Statistics Canada. The April 1 Canadian pig inventory was estimated at 12,020,000 pigs with 1,312,000 kept for breeding and 10.708 million kept for market. This compares to the March 1 USDA numbers for the US herd of 64.872 million pigs total inventory with 5.820 million breeding animals and 59,052 kept for market animals. Read More...
Many of us working in the swine industry are aware of the impact of corn prices on our feed costs in a general way. However, we don’t often think about the actual problems local feed mills face in keeping a steady supply of corn coming into the mill for our needs. Read More...
Most of us are aware in general terms how large the US pork industry is. In 2011 US packers slaughtered 109,967,000 pigs under federal inspection. This was up from 109,292,000 head in 2010. Read More...
Pork producers are beginning to act nervous about profit prospects this fall. SEW prices continue to decline, both on the contract and spot market as the Chicago futures continue to gradually decline in value. This past week USDA reported SEW prices as low as $27.50/pig delivered. The last time SEW pig spot market prices dropped this low was last November. Read More...