Since the first week of October live hogs prices in western Canada have declined by about 20 per cent.

H@ms Marketing Services risk management director Tyler Fulton says as hog supplies increase into the fall prices decline and, while it's not uncommon to see price declines from mid-August to late October of 20 per cent, what's interesting this year is that decline was delayed until the first week of October.

Tyler Fulton-h@ms Marketing Services

Probably what the primary focus of the market is these days is hog supply.

Most analysts had expected to see a surge in hog supplies over the course of the last month or two but we've probably close to doubled the increase that we expected.

I think a lot of it is coming from the fact that there were some hog supplies that were pushed back either due to poor feed quality or a disease problem and you can see that back in August when the US hog slaughter was running even seven, eight percent under last year's levels.

I think some of those hog supplies are probably coming in given the cooler temperatures, probably have the disease issues dealt with and new crop corn that's of great quality so we're seeing a real increase in the marketings to the point where we're dealing with probably one to one and a half percent higher marketings than we did at this time last year.

Mr Fulton says what we saw has been a delayed movement and generally a sharper movement.

He is hopeful we'll see an easing of supplies over the next month or so and suspects we could get a little relief from the downward tend and possibly a turn-around by US Thanksgiving.