Sort & Cull

While it's been raining new numbers at USDA this week, few would call the sudden cloudburst a drought breaker. The department is not known as the Amazon Jungle of data processing for nothing.

When it comes to bin-busting yields of statistics and reports, the paper farmers at Market News et al shell-out like Illinois in a terrarium. Of course, guarantees of test weight and protein content are strictly "buyer beware."

The early April downpour has been essentially seeded by the pork industry and market. On one hand, Mandatory Reporting of wholesale pork cuts -- presented on a trial basis since January 1 -- has been officially kicked into a midday/closing schedule. On the other hand, weekly export sales are now being reported by the Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS) for the first time.

I've long been an advocate of better reporting on wholesale pork business. To put it bluntly, the long-tolerated voluntary carlot system was an absolute joke. Buyers and sellers responded to government price inquiries only when it served their purpose.

On a day-to-day basis, these random and unfocused snapshots of product business were no more indicative of spot pork demand than refrigerator and swimsuit sales would be of global warming.

The new mandatory harness should afford a valuable price confidence for producers and processors alike, a critical reliability that serves better risk management while promoting the potential of more efficient marketing arrangements and techniques.

Unfortunately, greater precision always comes at a cost. Don't be thinking any of this can be delivered in a nutshell. More like a fleet of nut trucks.

With two, eight-page reports (FOB Omaha, FOB Plant) issued twice per day, plan on spending a good part of the day at the loading dock. And don't forget the hernia belt.

All joking aside, mandatory reporting requires mandatory reading -- lots of it. Frankly, extra reading time in a busy workday is a commodity that many of us simply can't produce.

The good news is that the new export info is much more user-friendly. By glancing at just a few totals in the report, you can take a quick and fairly meaningful pulse of foreign pork demand without bothering to park the pickup.

For some weird reason, U.S. pork exports have long escaped the net of weekly reporting even though the gov has been monitoring short-term sales of beef, cattle hides, wheat, wheat products, barley, corn, grain sorghum, oats, rye, soybeans, soybean cake and meal, soybean oil, flaxseed, linseed oil, cotton, sunflowerseed oil, cottonseed, cottonseed cake and meal, cottonseed oil, and rice for years.

The extended exclusion of pork from this crowd is as strange as how it managed to avoid the discipline of mandatory price reporting since its inception more than a decade ago. Indeed, given how exports have commanded a larger and larger portion of total commercial production (i.e., 23% in 2012), it may be even odder.

The inaugural report released Thursday confirmed late-March export sales of 48,355 metric tons (i.e., 106.4 million pounds). Since this is a new data series, year-ago comparison will have to wait. Still, I thought it was quite impressive that weekly pork sales were nearly five times greater than beef business for the same period.

Note that only pork muscle cuts are included in the weekly totals (available every Thursday) with processed products, variety meats or other offal not counted. Additionally, exporters under the FAS system are compelled to report only volume, leaving price and value information for later accounting.

Finally, regardless whether you're a "quick take" kind of person or someone who loves to interrogate numbers like a CIA agent who specializes in waterboarding, don't waste a lot of sleep trying to reconcile these weekly readings with monthly trade totals.

While monthly data is based on actual bills of lading, weekly totals are not. And besides the excluded items mentioned above, weekly business can also be skewed by issues of report timing, especially near the beginning and end of the month.

Still, this new measure of pork export demand is a good deal better than nothing, which is pretty much what we had just last week.

For more from John, visit http://www.feelofthemarket.com/…

(AG)

© Copyright 2013 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.