Farmscape for October 7, 2011   (Episode 3680)

The general manager of h@ms Marketing services reports a weaker Canadian dollar and strong exports of Pork from the U.S. have reversed the typical seasonal decline in live hog prices.

Typically, as the weather cools off in late August and early September and hogs start to grow faster, you see more hogs coming to market at heavier weights resulting in lower prices.

H@ms Marketing Services general manager Perry Mohr says what's happened this year has been just about the opposite of that.

Clip-Perry Mohr-h@ms Marketing Services:
We did see some initial weakness late August early September but since then we've seen some quite positive things happen in the hog market and that's been driven by two significant factors.

From a Canadian stand point one of the factors of course has been the quite rapid depreciation in the Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar.

We were trending towards I think in late August close to $1.10 U.S. and as of today we're about 95 cents and it even went below 94 cents for periods of time throughout this decline so we've seen a rapid depreciation in the dollar and that's added significantly to the Canadian hog prices.

Another significant factor is the fact that the U.S. is exporting a significant amount of pork to China and that has actually pushed U.S. prices higher at a time again when traditionally you would see the prices go down.

Despite this we are getting heavy runs of hogs and we are getting hogs at heavier weights but despite this because of the export demand we've seen the hog price actually increase in value over that period of time.

Mohr acknowledges we're getting close to reaching packer capacity in North America but with the packers making money we've seen a lot Saturday kills in the U.S. and even on this side of the border especially in Manitoba.

For farmscape.Ca, I'm bruce Cochrane.

       * Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council