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Despite Higher Hog Numbers ASF in Asia Expected to Fuel Higher North American Prices

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HAMS Marketing services says, despite unprecedented growth in North American hog production, there's good potential for further upside movement on the 2020 hog market but prices will remain volatile. In response to steadily increasing Chinese purchases of American pork over the past three to four weeks the futures have seen a five to ten percent upward move over the last week or so.
 
Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk Management with HAMS Marketing Services, says there's generally a lot of optimism and for good reason.
 
Clip-Tyler Fulton-HAMS Marketing Services:
 
Our supply situation is following up with a trend that developed earlier in the year, consistently better than five percent larger numbers as compared to last year. To put that in context we never really saw much more than a three percent growth year over year for any number over the last four years and so we're darn close to double the average growth.
 
Normally this time of year that would be a big concern and we are seeing easily the biggest weekly hog slaughters than we've ever seen before. But we have the capacity for it and it appears the timing of it is coming when maybe some of the pork might start moving offshore and we won't see the quite the same downward pressure that you might expect with five to six percent more hogs on the ground.
Source : Farmscape

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US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Video: US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Eric van Heugten, PhD, professor and swine extension specialist at North Carolina State University, recently spoke at the Iowa Swine Day Pre-Conference Symposium, titled Soybean Meal 360°: Expanding our horizons through discoveries and field-proven feeding strategies for improving pork production. The event was sponsored by Iowa State University and U.S. Soy.

Soybean meal offers pig producers a high-value proposition. It’s a high-quality protein source, providing essential and non-essential amino acids to the pig that are highly digestible and palatable. Studies now show that soybean meal provides higher net energy than current National Research Council (NRC) requirements. Plus, soybean meal offers health benefits such as isoflavones and antioxidants as well as benefits with respiratory diseases such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).

One of several ingredients that compete with the inclusion of soybean meal in pig diets is dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS).

“With DDGS, we typically see more variable responses because of the quality differences depending on which plant it comes from,” said Dr. van Heugten. “At very high levels, we often see a reduction in performance especially with feed intake which can have negative consequences on pig performance, especially in the summer months when feed intake is already low and gaining weight is at a premium to get them to market.”

Over the last few decades, the industry has also seen the increased inclusion of crystalline amino acids in pig diets.

“We started with lysine at about 3 lbs. per ton in the diet, and then we added methionine and threonine to go to 6 to 8 lbs. per ton,” he said. “Now we have tryptophan, isoleucine and valine and can go to 12 to 15 lbs. per ton. All of these, when price competitive, are formulated into the diet and are displacing soybean meal which also removes the potential health benefits that soybean meal provides.”