ddipietre

     We usually think about demand in the two dimensional way that we are restricted to visualizing it in with a graph.  That is, the amount demanded is a function of price.  In actuality there are several other factors which determine demand that are embedded in those graphs but not visualized.  For instance, we know that the level of income influences demand as does the availability and price of substitutes and something called tastes and preferences.  For instance, if you hate carrots, lowering the price is not likely to induce more quantity demanded, though we might show the demand curve for carrots for a group (like people in the U.S.) as a function of the price.

     The pig production business has always had its ups and downs but developments over the last few years have resulted in the structuralization of increased levels of price and financial risk.  By structuralization, I mean that these factors are now regular, recurring added risks that are no longer random, isolated events which no risk management process can adequately predict or mitigate effectively.  The factors include the predicted and now realized reduction in the average level of the stocks-to-use ratios for corn and soybeans placing feed prices in a continuing, annual, heightened state of price risk volatility.  Bob Wisner, retired crop extension professor from Iowa State University told World Pork Expo attendees that we will end up the soybean year with as little as 2.2 weeks of the supply remaining.  The cold, rainy corn belt conditions which delayed the corn planting period in the U.S.

It's time to get intensive. By that I mean we need to focus on existing but overlooked means to extract more value from our production. One way to do that is to focus on our revenue stream and the process which generates it so we become just as celebrated in our knowledge of this as we are for knowing our cost of production. Once that happens, we will have the components which make up profits (revenue and cost) and some really big changes will start to happen. But since almost no production workers have full access to the revenue numbers of the farm, they are continually focused only on cost of production and production metrics. Because of that, we still operate in a fifteen year old notion/and the "irrational exuberance" that believes if production rises and/or costs fall, we will automatically make more profits. The key error in this thinking is that pounds and pigs are not measures of value, they are measures of physical output and weight.

When you consider price movements in hogs, there are at least three regular patterns of price movements that are happening simultaneously and their interaction sometimes gives us an unusual outcome.  The three patterns are the seaonal, cyclical and trend patterns in prices that work together to nudge prices around a fairly predictable grand cycle though levels of prices, rather than their patterns of rise and fall are of course harder to predict.  I generally believe there are too many variables with too much variance to adequately provide a price forecast beyond a few weeks.  Since we live in the age of random shocks, all it takes is something like the H1N1 situation on top of a global recession to make price forecasting the terrible task that it always is.  There is a saying that price forecasters should know that seems especially appropriate and that is..."If you must forecast, forecast often." 

     We have in the US energy policy regarding ethanol an illustration of the classic problem in economics which I like to call "too many balls in the air".  When it comes to economic thinking and analysis, individuals or groups with "skin in the game" tend to focus tightly on the single variable they want to improve (like the corn price in the case of ethanol) and fail to understand that markets are complex interactions of sometimes hundreds of linked transactions and markets all of which can and usually are affected by extra-market interventions to move the target variable.  There are economic models that can and do attempt to account for all of these impacts simulataneously and track the movement to a new equilibrium in all affected markets but they can be large and clumsy and not very good at tracking the short term movements to new long term equilibria.

We are seeing something almost as destructive as a limited terrorist attack in terms of producing fear, panic, overreaction and economic injury.  Media misinformation and paniced responses from some world governments (like Egypt deciding to cull every pig, some 400,000 of them) has produced a sensationalized reaction from what at the end of the day will very likely be a very mild flu virus spreading around the world (http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-swine-reality30-2009apr30,0,3606923.story) but monitored like it was the bubonic plague.  Of course these scientists could be wrong and it is the fear of being wrong that has set the world in motion. 

     Unfortunately, we are at a time not only in the meat industry but also in the general U.S. and world economy when what little anyone had to make a forecast for the future has largely disappeared into an opaque soup of uncertainty.  There is little doubt that demand for meat, both in the United States and worldwide, is tied to among other things, per-capita income and a behavioral variable related to perceived and actual wealth (although there is some controvery about the wealth effect).  Both are down with rising unemployment and plummeting asset values. 

     The price outlook to producers can be summarized as I have said before by observing "which falls faster, supply or demand".  It is clear that both are falling, nationally and domestically, and the price responses still seem to suggest demand is falling faster than supply but a slowing is beginning to take place.  There seems to be some traction developing and as everyone in this business knows, spring is the beginning of the annual reduction in supply as various biological factors begin working their way through the production complex and summer demand for certain cuts begins to increase, at least domestically.  We have experienced years when the season price pattern for spring does not develop so it is not a sure thing.

     The externality crowd (the politicizers, activists and interest groups who believe that agricultural producers are pushing a multitude of costs off on the globe and their community without paying for them), should take a look in the mirror.  When a small group of the population, such as those who have a true willingness to pay for things like country of origin labeling, organic food, locally produced food, carbon-neutral food, etc. gain the political clout to force the costs of these attributes on everyone (willing to pay or not), they have used the government to structuralize a huge cost externality.  Which is to say, they have forced others to pay for attributes only they demand. 

     For years, modern swine producers thought about cost of production as a point or single number.  For almost a decade, a cost of production of 38 cents a pound was consider standard, high efficiency cost control.  Those days are gone and I don't mean just that number.  There is no new number which is or will be the normal cost of production for all of us who love to live by rules of thumb.  The cost of production for meat animals is largely determined by the cost of the underlying feed ingredients which have entered a phase of volatilty that is not likely to abate.  The continued mandates for ethanol production which will absorb four billion bushels of US corn production will keep key feed ingredient prices on a perpetual "stocks-to-use" razor and provide another source of price volatility here-to-fore reserved for weather events alone.  The combined impact of weather and reduced stocks-to-use values will force the volatility of the grain sector into the