Farmscape for January 3, 2018

The Manager of Risk Management with h@ms Marketing Services says 2018 is shaping up to be a good year for pork producers.
Following holiday shortened hog slaughter schedules North American pork processors starting to return to normal.
Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk Management with h@ms Marketing Services, says we're starting off the new year on a positive note and generally there's an air of optimism with most of the futures contracts trading up near contract highs.

Clip-Tyler Fulton-h@ms Marketing Services:
We're just starting up.
Actually it's not even going to be quite a full week on this first week of January so we haven't maybe totally seen all of the impacts of the holiday reductions in the slaughter schedule but producers were fairly current going in to the holidays and packers were very aggressive in sourcing those supplies in the weeks leading up.
The evidence now is pretty clear that we actually saw the largest hog slaughter that we've ever seen, pushing just close to 2.6 million hogs which is the largest that we've ever seen and is an indication that things were firing on all cylinders leading up to the holidays.
Packers were aggressive and producers were very current with their marketings and so I think, as far as the impact to cash prices, it's probably going to be a little bit less than what we have seen in years past.

Fulton notes packer margins are very firm which is good for producers in that, when we see greater competition as hog supplies start to tighten up in the spring and summer, we would anticipate that packers will have a little bit of room to bid up the price of hogs so generally speaking things look pretty solid for this next year.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork