Hogs Drop Most in Two Weeks on Rising Pork Supply; Cattle Fall

Hog prices fell the most in two weeks on signs of increasing U.S. supplies of pork. Cattle futures also slid.

Warehouses held 554.4 million pounds (about 251,000 metric tons) of pork at the end of December, up 14 percent from a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said yesterday in a report released after the close of trading. Chicken-meat inventories were 7.9 percent larger than a year earlier, and beef supplies rose 1.8 percent, USDA data show.

“The cold storage not only was a little bit heavy on the pork, poultry came in higher and so did beef,” Mark Schultz, the chief analyst at Northstar Commodity Investment Co. in Minneapolis, said in a telephone interview. “We came in a little bit heavier than what the trade was expecting.”

Hog futures for April settlement declined 0.7 percent to 87.65 cents a pound at 9:41 a.m. on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A close at that price would be the biggest slump for the most-active contract since Jan. 9.

Cattle futures for April delivery fell 0.4 percent to $1.30 a pound in Chicago. Prices are down 1.4 percent this month through yesterday.

Feeder-cattle futures for March settlement slid 0.6 percent to $1.4615 a pound on the CME.

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Campbell in Chicago at ecampbell14@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Steve Stroth at sstroth@bloomberg.net