Steve Meyer, Paragon Economics, provided an update on the economic outlook for the pork industry at the 2014 World Pork Expo on Thursday.

“The grain situation, the cost situation, is considerably better than a year ago, somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 per hundred weight better on cost of production,” said Meyer, adding that the outlook for the corn crop this year is very good right now.

That’s the good news. “The thing that’s working against us is the situation with soybean meal which we think could be quite explosive this summer,” said Meyer.

Of course, Meyer says the biggest problem right now for the industry is the PED virus. “We don’t know a whole lot from an economic standpoint,” he said. “If you do the math you come up with somewhere around 8 million pigs that we’ve lost in the last year…the big impact of that is yet to come.”

Learn more from Steve here: Pork Economic Outlook from Steve Meyer

2014 World Pork Expo photo album