FYI on Swine

U.S. exporters will continue to see “massive demand” for meat overseas, especially from China, the world’s biggest pork consumer, according to Brett Stuart, the co-founder of farm-industry researcher Global AgriTrends.

Top trade officials from the United States and European Union said today they were pleased with a final ruling from the WTO, which went against Chinese trade restraints on raw materials. The WTO’s Appellate Body said in Geneva that China needs to bring its restraints on exports of the materials into conformity with international trade agreement. The materials in question are used in the chemical and steel industries.

Researchers studying a potentially deadlier, airborne version of the bird flu virus have voluntarily suspended their studies for 60 days because of concerns it could be used as a devastating form of bioterrorism, according to a letter published in the journals Nature and Science on Friday.

Beijing. The price of pork in China could soon rival US payrolls as the world’s most watched economic indicator. International investors are increasingly focused on domestic demand in the world’s second-largest economy as their key measure of global economic health.

The U.S. on Tuesday dropped barriers to imports of Brazilian pork after roughly a year-and-a-half of working to guarantee the meat will comply with sanitary standards. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recognized Brazilian inspectors as capable of approving slaughterhouses in Santa Catarina state to export raw pork to the U.S., Brazil's Agriculture Ministry said in a press release. Cooked or processed pork from some other Brazilian states may also be exported via meatpacking plants in Santa Catarina, which the Agriculture Ministry says has been free of foot-and-mouth disease since 2001.

Rain in Argentina on Tuesday brought some relief to the drought-stricken central part of the country, but concerns remained. The persistent dry spell, blamed on La Niña, has not only worried agricultural producers, but could affect tax revenues, officials say. Two of the crops most affected by the drought, corn and soybeans, are important revenue-makers for the government through taxes, said Carlos Casamiquela, director of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology. If the soybean crops are damaged as much as some forecasts predict and international prices rise, the revenue the government can pull in would be affected, he said.

Meat suppliers can track a single pig all the way from live animal to pork chop, thanks to new technology from IBM that may limit or prevent disease outbreaks. Pigs are identified with a barcoded ear tag. That tag helps track various pig parts as they pass through the slaughterhouse and on to the processing plant, the distribution center and finally the package in a grocer's case. Some trial systems are being installed in slaughterhouses and retail stores in the Chinese province of Shandong. China's interest stems from an outbreak of blue-ear pig disease from 2006 to 2007. The illness doesn't affect humans, but at the time, it led to a pork shortage and sent prices soaring. There was worry that the disease could spread to other pigs around the globe.

Pointing out that pork producers depend on risk-management tools, including futures contracts, to deal with the volatility in feed grain and hog prices, the National Pork Producers Council early this week urged Congress to bolster confidence in the futures market in the wake of the MF Global bankruptcy.

Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) education and research has increased over the past 10 years, yet there is still more to be learned about this profit robbing disease. In keeping with its annual commitment to the advancement of research and understanding for PRRS control, Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Inc. (BIVI) is announcing a call for proposal submissions for its annual Advancement in PRRS Research Award. A total amount of $75,000 will be awarded to study PRRS in an effort to control its impact. Proposal submissions are due 1 January, 2012.

On 23 December, the USDA will release the results of its latest survey of the US swine inventory. Hog producers enjoyed record hog prices this summer and I believe that has caused some modest herd expansion, writes Ron Plain in his Swine Economic Report.

Is the Chinese bubble about to burst? For some time now out of the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - China's growth rate has been not only one of the most rapid, but it has also been dragging the rest of the world economies along behind it - shining as a beacon to the faltering economies in Europe and the US

In a year of record agricultural earnings in the U.S., Steve Ruh spent a chunk of his income to build what’s become an increasingly common sight at farms across the Midwest -- grain storage bins. The Illinois corn grower started with 250,000 bushels (2 million gallons) of storage capacity in 2009 and added 100,000 this year to avoid wasting precious harvest time in line at grain elevators. He can now hold crops in gluts, hoping to sell at higher prices when grain is scarcer, and is storing half the 400,000-bushel corn crop this season at his farm in Sugar Grove.

Attending a conference on the end of piglet castration in the European Union, held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, I notice that both the topic as well as the visitors are unique. The topic is unique as the theme of castration always used to be discussed, but hardly ever before a whole public conference was organised, attracting 150 international experts. The only other one I came across was held mid-last year, on Raising Boars, in the Netherlands as well.

Bacteria taken from farms still showed resistance, up to 2 ½ years after the administering of antibiotics was discontinued, a Canadian study says. Farms quitting antibiotics may still be breeding grounds for drug-resistant germs, reported Science magazine.

A study to be published in the online journal mBio® (Nov 29) shows that adding antibiotics to swine feed causes microorganisms in the guts of these animals to start sharing genes that could spread antibiotic resistance.

Following an initial project begun in 1999 at the Iowa State University (ISU) swine breeding farm, the university’s swine teaching farm started composting mortalities eight years ago in an effort to increase biosecurity practices. Swine farms manager Jay Lampe said the move was positive.

Over the past two years, the Department of Agriculture's monthly forecasts of how much farmers will harvest have been off the mark to a greater degree than any other two consecutive years in the last 15, according to a Journal analysis of government data. This year's early-season forecasts also appear to have been way off.

For Canada, the cost of either meeting its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, or failing to do so, was too much to bear. On Monday, the country became the first signatory of the landmark climate treaty to back out of the deal, citing the huge potential cost of legally binding commitments.