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
