Farmscape for December 21, 2016

The Chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board says, as North American meat and poultry production increases in response to low feed costs, the pork industry will become increasingly dependant on exports.
Florian Possberg, the Chair of Sask Pork, says, an anticipated price crash in the fall of 2016 didn't materialize so, while the pork industry didn't have a great year, prices in 2016 were good enough that a lot of producers made modest positive incomes.

Clip-Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
The big thing is that the cutout value, the wholesale price of pork, stayed a lot higher given the quantity of pork hitting the market than what most had anticipated so that allowed for our packing industry to enjoy very good profit margins and thus they really cranked up their slaughter capacity to accommodate the large numbers this fall.
Also there's a number of large plants under construction in the U.S. to process more hogs so we don't anticipate an issue with capacity into 2017.
However we've had a couple of years now with modest feed prices.
As a result of that we're seeing record amounts of poultry, pork, beef all come onto the market place.
There's going to be more additional meat in North America than our consumers here can handle so we're really going to depend on export markets for all our meat commodities to stay in a positive state.

Possberg notes southeast Asia, China and the Philippines were quite strong in 2016 due to shortages in 2015 and 2016 but producers there have increased production so the big question whether we'll be able maintain our export numbers and increase them.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork