Tyler Fulton, the director of risk management with h@ms Marketing Services, said a range of strategies helps minimize the impact of COVID-19 related slowdowns at the Maple Leaf plant in Brandon, MB. 
Uncertainty over the impact of COVID-19 on pork processing capacity continues to pressure live hog markets. 
Fulton said a number of the bigger plants in the United States had to deal with the effects of COVID-19 far earlier with some complete plant shutdowns in the U.S. in May. For the most part, western Canadian processors didn’t see any negative impacts from COVID-19 until mid-August. At Maple Leaf in Brandon, it impacted a relatively small number of the employees. 
“I think we have more information than we did back in May and are better prepared,” he said. 
“Maple Leaf took strong action in advance of the current issue to make some contingencies and deal with it better.” 
Fulton said producers are looking at shipping hogs to places they may not have shipped before, and that’s partly the role of h@ms Marketing, to find a home for those hogs because the hogs don’t stop growing. 
“When they are ready, there’s a whole just-in-time system in place, and when there’s a disruption, we need to find another location for them,” he said. “It’s all hands on deck to clear some of that supply.” 

That means moving hogs out of province, to other plants within the province and moving some hogs into provincially inspected plants that typically do a relatively small number of hogs.  
Fulton said there’s no doubt Maple leaf is seeing a reduction in production, but the signs are good that they’ll get back up to speed quicker. 
On the matter of hog prices for hog farmers, the director of risk management encourages producers to watch for rallies in the futures market over the winter months that could allow them to reduce their losses. 
Fulton said the summer pricing has failed to deliver anything even close to profitable production, although futures crept back a little. 
“We could start setting some targets if we get another eight to 10 percent rally from October through February, I think that would be a good trigger to re-enter the market,” he said. “Not many producers took protection at these levels because they are quite unprofitable, and, if we do see a recovery, then I would say producers would probably get back and try to cover off some of that risk.” 
Fulton said most likely still at a loss, but it would provide some certainty and be possibly a smaller loss than otherwise expected with the cash market. It’s a prolonged period where prices are not profitable, and there’s no prospect in the next three to six months that this change.  
He said the U.S. continues to deal with record-setting hog numbers and anticipate moving an additional six to eight percent more pigs through the late August to early December run-up. 
“The peak tends to come in late November early December, so we’ll be looking at larger hog supplies and likely continued pressure on prices.” 
Fulton said export demand took a lull from its peak, but year-to-date compared to a year ago or any year previous, North America moved out more pork ever before.  
“We’re talking record-setting pace largely because of larger volumes to China. However, long disruptions caused long periods where we saw below a year ago volume levels,” he said. The prices did not keep up with the demand mainly because China took so much pork early on when the prices were better than really what domestic prices were there. 
He said domestically in North America, there’s evidence that demand performed reasonably well, but it’s still tough to measure because of such disruption in the flows. The volumes slowed going through foodservice restaurants with far more going through the grocery chains. •
— By Harry Siemens