May 11, 2020 Pork Market Summary Data. Click the link to see the graphic. 2020-05-11 Pork Market Summary data

Data Through harvest on Saturday 5/9/2020 (reports on 5/11/20220)

Few updates today:

  1. Industry harvested 1.5M last week (Week 19) up from 1.3 the prior week
  2. We are estimating that we should on average have 2.2M pigs available for harvest each week in Quarter 2, 2020. To date, we estimate that the industry has 2.5M pigs should have been but have not been harvested. It is safe to assume that if we cannot exceed 2.2M per week in the very short term all of those pigs will have to be depopulated and disposed of.
  3. If Illinois is 12% of national production, that implies that we already have 293,000 pigs in Illinois that should have been harvested but have not been.
  4. Both carcass price ($58 to $77/cwt) and Cut out values ($55 to $118/carcass cwt) have improved over the last 4 weeks expanding packer margins and giving the strong incentive to increase kill.
  5. The Monday kill was rumored to be at about 70% of “normal” (data will be reported tomorrow morning on the LM_HG201). That implies a pace similar to last week of about 1.5M head for the week. At that pace, we will add another 700,000 pigs to the inventory of pigs that should have been harvested but have not been.
  6. It appears that the best case scenario is another 4-5 weeks at 1.5-1.7M per week. That means that the total inventory of excess pigs will more than double both nationally and in Illinois. If all of those pigs are destroyed it would imply an annual reduction in meat production by about 5%.
  7. I have the cattle harvest data and will try and incorporate it in the next summary.  Projections say there are 2M excess head over the next 60 days that will not be harvested.