DES MOINES, Iowa — Hog producers are having a difficult time finding reliable price information on U.S. hog sales.
The United States Department of Agriculture offers no hints at how accurate its current published prices are, nor how producers might be able access better-grounded numbers.
“Clearly a lot of producers are making decisions that are based on a very small subset of those hogs marketed,” USDA agricultural marketing service deputy administrator Craig Morris said during the World Pork Expo, held June 8-10 in Des Moines.
Read Also
Sask. ag group wants strychnine back
The Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan has written to the federal government asking for emergency use of strychnine to control gophers
“As a team we have a lot of opinions on that.”
However, Morris wouldn’t offer further details.
“We should just be one voice at the table on that.”
Fewer than four percent of hogs sold in the U.S. are priced in a publicly reportable manner and available as part of the data for the USDA published numbers.
That’s a tiny minority of a multi-billion dollar market, but it forms the basis for a lot of contract pricing and for other payment-setting tools used by many farmers.
The situation has concerned the USDA and pork marketers for years, and it leaves farmers exposed to volatility in reported prices that may not match true commercial pig values.
In 2015, the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act was re-authorized, which continued the collection of livestock prices, but a committee is expected to report to Congress about the situation by 2018.
While only a few hogs are sold on open markets, those prices are still thought to be the best representative of what a pig is “worth” on any given day.
“With that sunshine, people have more confidence in the data, so they’re really trusting that the data is reflective of the marketplace. “But you can become blind to the fact now that those prices are more and more being derived off a much smaller subset of animals than they ever have in our history,” said Morris.
