Despite Higher Numbers Live Hog Prices Improve

By Bruce Cochrane

The director of risk management with h@ms Marketing Services says, despite higher live hog numbers, prices in western Canada have improved over the past couple of weeks.

Although live hogs numbers have been climbing, in line with the seasonal trends we typically see at this time of year, live hogs prices have improved in western Canada over the past couple of weeks.
Tyler Fulton, the director of risk management with h@ms Marketing Services, says it's a bit of a counterseasonal trend which is surprising given that prices typically erode after the Labor Day holiday and especially when exports haven't been performing that well.

Tyler Fulton-h@ms Marketing Services:
The profit situation is about the tightest that we've seen in the last two years.

But arguably Canadian producers are generally in profitable territory and that's largely due to the fact that the Canadian dollar is as weak as it have been against the U.S. dollar.

I think the feed market situation, I'd say Canadian producers are breathing a little bit of a sigh of relief in that there's a belief out there that there will be a lot of feed quality supplies and producers won't be left too short.

Obviously that's pretty region specific.
There's areas of western Saskatchewan that really struggled to make any type of a crop because of early drought but, overall as far as the industry goes, I think profitability looks OK given the time of year and some of the challenges we've had.

Fulton notes hog prices are at a far lower level than they were at this time last year but, he points out, last year were dealing with a ten percent reduction in hog supply as a result of losses incurred from PED.

Source: Farmscape