Farrow-to-finish hog profit margins are currently about $20 per head, and that trend should hold through much of the fourth quarter of this year.
“That’s certainly a welcome sight from where they’ve been,” Sterling Marketing president John Nalivka told AgriTalk host Chip Flory on Thursday.
Nalivka said the hog industry was hit hard by the packing plant bottlenecks found last spring.
“It’s one thing to have cattle standing in a feedlot that you can continue to feed,” Nalivka said. “It’s different in farrow-to-finish hog operations where you have feeder pigs in and market hogs out. That flow needs to remain very well-balanced.”
He said producers losing money on their hogs combined with the emotional stress of pandemic-related decisions they were forced to make was unique to the hog industry.
It’s not just the animal welfare issues they faced, he said, but the fact those farmers wanted to care for their animals created “a bad situation, one that was a chain reaction.”
Now, though, Nalivka says pork packers are doing a good job moving hogs through the system.
“We have a good market across the board, from the perspective of packer margins and producer margins.”
