Why did Ontario pig marketings spike in August?

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Eyebrows were raised in mid-August when Ontario hog marketings rose to substantially higher levels than normal. In the week ending Aug. 21, Ontario Pork recorded sales of 110,000 market hogs, considerably higher than in previous weeks. What was going on?

Was there an influx of pigs from Quebec? Had Ontario producers bought a huge number of cheap weaners from Western Canada in the spring and fed them, counting on a summer price rally that never came?

The answer, according to Ontario Pork's sales team manager Patrick O'Neil, was somewhat less dramatic than either of those scenarios. Packers were hanging onto contract hogs in July and slaughtering fewer of them, resulting in a surplus of pigs in barns.

In early August, there was a holiday weekend and a short week to operate the plants. In the week of Aug. 10, there were unspecified "plant problems" that also held supplies of pigs back.

The result, on Aug. 22, was a Saturday kill, "and most of that was just catching up," O'Neil says. He expects Ontario to be on track the following week for a 100,000-head kill, which is much closer to normal than the weeks previously. BP