The recent USDA report on hog and pig numbers shows tighter supplies coming into 2014. Jim Robb of the Livestock Market Information Center says that report will impact beef prices a lot more than an average hog and pigs count.
"We've had quite a bit of concern over the last couple of years in terms of competing meat supplies in terms of pork and chicken and those relative prices compared to beef prices and maybe taking some market share away. We really haven't seen that in the last two years, but we were very concerned looking ahead here to 2014 with very strong profitability in both the pork and the chicken sectors.
"The USDA Hog and Pigs report really did show surprisingly tight numbers. Now we've had a disease problem in the U.S.-it really cropped up last summer-called porcine epidemic diarrhea or PED. And that has had quite an impact on the ability of U.S. pork production to ramp up. So, the USDA came in with some surprisingly low numbers. They did substantial revisions to the earlier numbers, so this disease situation is really putting a cap on the growth potential of the U.S. hog industry and we're not going to see quite as much competition at the meat case as we expected a couple of months ago."
