When corn is cheap, hogs get plentiful. The annual Pork Powerhouses ranking of the 25 largest producers in the U.S. shows a gain of 128,000 sows in the past year. With two new packing plants set to open in 2017, producers are gearing up to supply more pigs.
Click here for full-size chart. Twelve producers have partnered with Clemens Food Group in the new, fresh pork processing facility under construction in Coldwater, Michigan. Most of those farms are expanding, including Hord Livestock Company in Bucyrus, Ohio, and Cooper Farms in Oakwood, Ohio, both with 24,000 sows.
In Iowa, Seaboard Triumph Foods is breaking ground this fall on a fresh pork plant near Sioux City. Most of the farmer owners of Triumph Foods, with 445,500 sows total, are already expanding. Both the Clemens and the Seaboard Triumph plants will kill 10,000 hogs a day.
"This is a big move for our industry, two new plants at the same time," says Mike Brandherm, general manager of Hitch Pork Producers, Guymon, Oklahoma. "What does Seaboard do to source pigs in the new plant in Iowa? We are waiting to hear if there's room to grow."
"We are considering expansion," says Bob Dykhuis, CEO of Dykhuis Farms (16,000 sows) in Holland, Michigan. “The new slaughterhouse in Michigan will create a need for more pigs at the other slaughterhouses. We are considering what our role could be in filling that need. I am having our current sow farm sites evaluated for siting to see if we can make them larger in size.”
JBS Makes a Move
Shaking up the industry even more was the announcement on July 1 that JBS USA Pork, a subsidiary of Brazilian-based JBS S.A., is buying Cargill Pork, including two packing plants and four hog farms. JBS is already a major pork, beef, and lamb processor, as well as a majority shareholder of Pilgrim's Pride Corporation, the second-largest poultry company in the U.S.
JBS and Cargill Pork are separate companies until regulatory approval of the sale by the Department of Justice, which could take a year. Cargill has a total inventory today of 175,000 breeding females, with room for another 10,000 sows at the Dalhart, Texas, location.
Smithfield Up in U.S. and Mexico
For the nation's largest pork producer, Smithfield Foods, owned by China-based WH Group, sow numbers are up slightly by 7,000 sows this year to 894,000, says Gregg Schmidt, president of Smithfield Hog Production (formerly called Murphy-Brown). All Smithfield company farms will be converted from crates to group housing pens by 2017, which has caused the increase in numbers.
