hogs

Four Iowa residents have petitioned the state to better regulate airborne waste from hog farms. Currently, Iowa requires farmers to retain manure until it is applied as fertilizer. But the residents argue that farmers aren’t retaining all the manure — that some is being spread to nearby homes by blowers and air vents.

A coalition of consumer, free speech and animal rights groups filed suit in federal court in Des Moines to challenge the constitutionality of Iowa's "ag gag" law, enacted in 2012. Iowa is the No. 1 state for hog and egg production and the largest target yet by campaigners against state laws that criminalize undercover employment on farms and at packing plants.

After almost completely removing the growth-promoting drug ractopamine from its pigs, Canada is outpacing the U.S. in pork sales to China, where the drug is banned. Canada has only beat out the U.S. in pork sales a handful of times in the last 20 years, says Reuters.

Gov. Larry Hogan stood aside and let a Maryland law take effect without his signature that will bar use of medically important antibiotics to promote weight gain among cattle, hogs and poultry. The Maryland law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2018, the same implementation date as a similar law enacted in 2015 in California, the only other state to control antibiotic use with the goal of preserving the effectiveness of the drugs to fight disease in humans.

Decades ago, hog farmers described the pungent aroma of hog manure as the smell of money. Now, the North Carolina state House has passed a bill that could save them money if they are sued for creating a nuisance due to the smell of animal waste, says the Associated Press.

U.S. hog farms held 71 million head of pigs at the start of this month, the largest herd ever for this time of the year, said a quarterly USDA report. Analysts said the large number of hogs "should help keep the lid on pork prices at the meat case through 2018," reported Reuters.

Market prices for wheat, corn and hogs fell this fall to their lowest level in 10 years, said Purdue economist Chris Hurt, who predicts farmers will lose money on hogs for months to come. "The industry will need to consider a reduction in the breeding herd in the last half of 2017 in order to boost prices back closer to break-evens in 2018," says Hurt at farmdoc Daily.

Two years after soaring to record highs, "hog prices have collapsed to levels far below break-even," says Purdue economist Chris Hurt. Hog farmers will lose an average $10 a head this year and $16 a head in 2017 because there are so many hogs being fed for slaughter, they could exceed the capacity of packing plants to handle them.

Livestock shows are a standard part of county fairs nationwide and plenty of fair-goers walk through the barns to see hogs, cattle, sheep, chickens and other farm animal firsthand. And now, the Centers for Disease Control says 18 people, all but two of them children, tested positive for new strains of influenza after attending agricultural fairs in Ohio and Michigan during August, reports Harvest Public Media.

In Mount St. Joseph, in western Kentucky, "there is trouble in the air and it comes along with the smell of a large hog farm," says Ohio Valley ReSource, a public broadcasting project in the Ohio River Valley. A community group says Piggy Express, a recently constructed washing facility for trucks that haul hogs, might produce polluted runoff, but they have little recourse because of the Kentucky's right-to-farm law.

The Obama administration is pushing back against critics of its plans to overhaul fair-play rules for livestock marketing, saying opposition to the rules "demonstrates a complete lack of concern for honest, hard-working families." Congress repeatedly blocked USDA from issuing the rules but USDA has a window of opportunity that may close at the end of September, says DTN.

Historically, small or medium-sized farms produced the majority of the annual pig crop. But in the space of two decades, three at the most, the hog industry was transformed into a sector dominated by large farms with at least 5,000 head apiece, says the USDA's Overview of the U.S. Hog Industry report, issued for the first time since 2009.

U.S. farms hold 68.4 million head of hogs, up 4 percent from a year ago when the sector began to recover from the Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus that killed millions of piglets and drove pork prices to record highs, said the USDA in a quarterly report.

Beef prices are up 15 percent from a year ago and pork prices are up nearly 12 percent due to short supplies, said the Agriculture Department in a look at food inflation. Some relief is expected in the remaining months of the year, so USDA forecasts the average beef price this year to be 9 percent higher than last year. Pork would be 8 percent higher.

An Iowa company wants to build the largest hog farm in Wisconsin, which also would be the first megafarm in the Lake Superior basin, says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Farmers in the top corn, wheat, soybean, and hog states are twice as likely as farmers in smaller-volume states to use precision agriculture practices, such as GPS guidance, said the USDA’s farm computer report on Thursday. Usage often topped 50 percent in the top row-crop states, while the U.S. average was just 27 percent.