Two years after a devastating swine virus killed nearly 10 percent of U.S. hogs, farmers who built up herds to compensate are faced with a sober realization: they've produced too much bacon.
The aggressive ramp-up in hog production after the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv) outbreak in 2013, which brought record profits for those whose pigs survived, has now created the greatest U.S. hog price collapse since the late 1990s. That was when overproduction sent prices plunging 75 percent to 50-year lows.
Benchmark lean hog futures prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange have dropped 42 percent from their July 2014 record high of $133 per hundredweight (cwt).
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