Sort & Cull

When President Clinton signed P.L. 106-78 in the fall of 1999, many assumed that the new police force monitoring mandatory price report would be equally concerned with beef and pork wholesale business. They were wrong.

For reasons that I still don't completely understand, the beef trade was the only meat biz at that time to get strapped into the harness of mandatory reporting. Frankly, neither the powers that be in the production sector nor the packing world lobbied for more accurate and certifiable price reporting on pork.

So for the next 10 years or so, the wholesale pork trade continued to be haphazardly reported by the government based on strictly voluntary participation. Price and volume news received from limited sources was essentially recorded and published on a "trust me" basis.

It was all about as transparent as a black cat at midnight.

Finally, in the summer of 2010, the brainiacs in Washington decided that placing the pork market under the proven umbrella of mandatory reporting could result in real and valuable marketing options for producers, processors, retailers, food managers, and exporters.

Yet just because the drafty halls of government actually hatch a good idea now and then is no reason to put the process on fast track.

Rule-makers have been hard at work reinventing the wheel for the past two and a half years. Don't you think that the protocols, computer programs, and gov-packer coordination perfected over the years on the beef side would serve as natural and expeditious templates for pork reporting?

Apparently not.

At any rate, here's the good news: As of Monday, Jan. 7, Market News will finally raise the curtain on mandatory reporting of the wholesale pork trade. Well, maybe not the entire curtain.

Would you believe starting with a few, well-focused spotlights on negotiated sales? That's how this new arm of mandatory will begin. And once reporters feel comfortable with handling the negotiated data, they'll move on to formulated business, then to forward sales, then to sow and boar pork, then to exports, and then to a comprehensive cut-out.

Sources at Market News tell me that if the speed bumps are not too wicked, the entire pork reporting system could be up and running smoothly by midsummer.

While Rome wasn't built in a day, I suspect whenever building projects dragged on for this long, the emperor's lions could count on a big meal.

Yet I suppose another six months is no big deal when we've been waiting for more than a decade for the right thing to be done.

I believe more market information is always better. Greater reliability serves both small and large producers in successfully managing risk.

We're getting there. But I'm still sad it's taken the pork industry so long to climb out of the pricing dark.

(AG)

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