H@ms Marketing Services reports the typical spring rally has begun in live hog prices.
Spring and summer is typically when North American live hog prices cycle higher.
Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk management with h@ms Marketing Services says for the last couple of weeks we've seen some pretty decent improvements in U.S. cash prices.
Tyler Fulton-h@ms Marketing Services:
This is fairly standard for this time of year.
We start to see increasing signs of tightening hog supplies which typically leads to the big rally over the spring time frame.
The unique thing I think about this year is that we really took prices down low in late March, lower than what most had anticipated and so to date our spring rally has really only kind of taken us back to levels that we were at kind of in mid-March.
It's still a bit early to say whether or not we're going to follow the same trend but there's no doubt the last two weeks of cash market trade has been positive in that we've recovered a good chunk of what we lost over the previous six weeks or so.
So the supply is tightening but very slowly.
The hog slaughter over the course of the last six weeks to two months or so has averaged about three and a half to four percent larger than what we saw last year.
Source : Farmscape