| farmer4321 - 8/17/2018 06:46 Pork (& beef) that was going to China is now piling up in frozen storage with nowhere to go. While it wasn't a huge percentage of the US production & market it is more than enough to drag the cash price down. Last year the trade moved something like 55,000 metric tonnes of pork to China, this year a truncated market season it'll be on the order of 20,000 metric tonnes. Next year, maybe zero. Remember, the packers don't buy pork just to sit on it, money tied up in frozen inventory isn't available to buy hogs. Sorry to say, but farmers are getting just what they asked for.
Except that the cold storage reports haven't showed this "piling up in frozen storage with nowhere to go" that you are claiming.
And the product market while not great is a whole lot higher than the hog market. At the current product market and hog market the packers have a $50/hd profit for killing hogs.
This doesn't have near as much to do with Trump as it has to do with several former administrations allowing the packing industry to get so concentrated that there no longer is any competition in the market.
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Hogs
