Forward hog contract prices have been on the downturn over the past month or so.

Tyler Fulton is the director of risk management with Hams Marketing Services.

"Things are generally not as rosy, as what they were a month ago," he said. "I think what's probably coming in the market right now is the view that we're going to be looking at heavy supplies for the foreseeable future, really over the next year and it may be a struggle to clear the market at similar values to what we saw last year in the cash market."

Fulton says U.S. regional cash markets held steady in last week’s trade and are following the direction of the wholesale pork market which was largely unchanged from the previous week.

He adds the weekly slaughter was estimated by the USDA at 2.332 million hogs or about 2.8% larger than last year’s levels, adding most slaughter plants are having no difficulty sourcing hogs for their planned weekday production schedules, but most packers have eliminated their weekend production completely.

The latest pork trade data came out last week and showed total US pork exports were up 2.7% from the year-ago level, nearly matching the gains in US pork production.

However, there was a significant change in the destination of these sales, with a decline in volume to the largest markets for US pork. Mexico was down 4.2%, while Japan dropped 13.4%. This was offset by gains into South Korea (+41%).