Hog futures fell for a fifth straight session, heading for the longest slump since October, on speculation that U.S. pork demand is waning. Cattle dropped to the lowest price in more than two months.
Wholesale pork slid to 82.29 cents a pound yesterday, the lowest since January 2011, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. Stockpiles of the meat totaled 584.4 million pounds at the end of January, 8.5 percent more than a year earlier, the most recent government data show. The USDA will update its inventory figure on March 22.
“The meat complex in general is softer,” Lawrence Kane, a market adviser at Stewart-Peterson Group in Yates City, Illinois, said in a telephone interview. In the USDA report, “people are looking for another increase, so that’s one of the negatives. The question is: How big of an increase do we see? We have plenty of pork.”
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