Live hog prices have been trending only slightly higher, although we've started to see a bit of the typical seasonal rally.

Tyler Fulton, the director of risk management with H@ms Marketing Services, observed the US hog slaughter has been remarkably steady, as we're seeing slaughter animals from the sows added to the US breeding herd a year ago hitting the market now, and it's evident the vaccines used to manage PED have been fairly successful resulting in fewer losses.

Tyler Fulton-H@ms Marketing Services:

We've started to see a bit of the typical seasonal rally that we would expect to see at this time of year.

But I would say that the US hog slaughter has been stubbornly steady.

Normally what triggers the rally in hog prices in the spring time is a combination of tighter hog supplies and better demand.

When people starting kicking off the grilling season, typically in early to mid-May, we usually start to see a pop in prices.

Things are really quite slow to come this year.

We've seen slight improvement in recent weeks but typically, we would have already seen some bigger moves.

Fulton noted that, on the demand side, we're dealing with a high US dollar making the Americans less competitive on the world market and there's more pork backing up in the US domestic market so we're calling on US consumers to purchase more but, because of last year's high prices, they're not being provided price incentives by the grocers.

He said things aren't looking optimistic, so something needs to snap the cycle.