World Perspectives
livestock

Livestock Roundup: Quarterly Hogs and Pigs Report

USDA released its quarterly hogs and pigs report today. The inventory of all hogs and pigs on 1 March was 74.3 million head, up slightly from March 2025 but down 1.5 percent from 1 December. The report was in line with the previous five-year average of a decrease of 1.8 percent from December to March.

In fact, the report showed a generally steady hog herd. Breeding inventory, at 5.89 million head, was down 1 percent from last year and slightly lower than in December. Market hog inventory, at 68.4 million head, was up 1 percent from last year but down 2 percent from December. Notably, the category of hogs weighing 180 pounds or more, or those closest to harvest, increased 2 percent.

Operations with more than 5,000 head, which raise hogs un...

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From WPI Consulting

Communicating importance of value-added products

Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.

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