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The last load of
hogs was sold on Dec. 23, office manager Carol Clayton said in
an interview on Wednesday. Reuters News will no longer publish
the daily price report for the Peoria stockyard.
After that, she said, no more animals will be accepted for sale
there, and farmers will need to sell their pigs outright to
local pork packers or head to smaller sale barns in the area.
Peoria was the last of the major hog auction terminals that
dominated the Midwestern landscape in the 1950s, said Ron Plain,
a University of Missouri livestock economist.
"Losing these markets make it tougher on smaller producers who
use markets like Peoria because they never sell very many hogs
at a time and it's costly hauling them to packing plants,"
said," Plain said.
Over the decades, the number of U.S. hog farms has consolidated,
leaving fewer - but larger - producers of the country's pigs. An
increasing number of swine, too, are being sold directly to mega
packers, such as Smithfield Foods , which is owned by China's WH
Group Ltd.
That shift in production and processing also contributed to the
auction house's demise, Clayton said.
When Clayton, 72, arrived for work 26 years ago, farmers flocked
to the Midwestern auction barn, which sold as many as 2,000 pigs
per day.
Now, the auction house sells 100 to 200 pigs on a good day, she
said.
"It's sad that it's closing, but it's time to close after our
owner, Ron Jenkins, passed away in June," said Clayton.
(Reporting by Theopolis Waters; Editing by P.J. Huffstutter and
Richard Chang)
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