Farmscape for January 24, 2018

H@ms Marketing Services says continued strong demand for pork will be a key factor influencing hog markets moving toward spring.
After a brisk recovery following the holidays U.S. cash hog markets have settled into a more steady trend.
Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk Management with h@ms Marketing Services, says early in the quarter processors were buying more aggressively, possibly due to the fact that two or three new plants were operating at close top single shift capacity.

Clip-Tyler Fulton-h@ms Marketing Services:
We never really saw much appreciation in wholesale pork prices and so that may have made some of them a little bit more cautious, not willing to give up on their margins so early in the year.
The U.S. hog slaughter has moderated.
That was anticipated based on the latest inventory reports that we got from the USDA.
We're running approximately 2.35 million hogs, maybe 2.45, somewhere in that range which is well down from capacity so we don't have any issues and we don't foresee any problems with capacity issues at all in 2018.
Going forward I think that we can expect a general tend where there's tightening numbers.
We're still going to trend higher than what we did year ago but in general there's a fair amount of predictable seasonality to hog markets and so we expect that hog numbers will likely decline by roughly 10 thousand per week for probably seven to ten weeks or so.

Fulton says we're dealing with record pork production by virtue of large hog numbers and higher weights so continued solid demand for pork will be critical.
He says the root of the demand has largely been in he U.S,. domestic market and, with the Economy performing well, we'll hopefully see further improvements but the wild card continues to be on the export front which accounts for 20 to 25 percent of all U.S. production.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork