LH SPECIALIST · Livestock / Pork Supply
LH Canadian Feeder Pig Imports
Canadian farmers ship weanling pigs south into Iowa and Minnesota finishing yards. The number crossing the border today is a five to six month head-start on US pork supply, and the signal reads correctly in the direction the physical mechanism predicts.
At a glance
Current reading
-0.044
Reading sits at -0.044 in the NORMAL band, 33 trading days running
Signal state
Normal
NORMAL
Phase duration
33 sessions
33 trading days in the NORMAL band
Next release
Monthly
US Census Bureau publishes monthly HS-code swine import data on roughly the third week of…
As of Oct 29, 2026. Updated nightly.
OBJECTIVE
Every year, roughly five to six million weanling pigs are trucked out of Manitoba down into Iowa and Minnesota finishing yards. A farmer in Winnipeg breeds the sow; the piglets are weaned at three weeks and crossed into the US where corn is cheaper; they spend the next five to six months growing to market weight. Then they walk into a Smithfield or Tyson packing plant and become US pork supply.
That means the trucks crossing the border this month are not today’s Lean Hogs supply — they are the supply story for next spring. If Canadian producers slow their shipments now, you will see tighter US pork five to six months from now, and Lean Hogs futures tend to firm into that tightness. If shipments accelerate, the opposite happens.
This signal takes the US Census Bureau monthly swine import data, compares it to the same month a year earlier, and standardizes the change. The sign is flipped so that a fall in imports reads positive — bullish Lean Hogs forward. It carries 22 percent weight inside the LH Supply Census Composite, where it does its best work as the orthogonal diversifier that pulls on a time horizon the curve and the feed-margin inputs miss.
LIVE CHART
Canadian feeder pig flows (YoY, 5-year z, sign-flipped) against Lean Hogs forward price, 1990 to today
The blue line is this signal’s reading on the left axis. The orange line is Lean Hogs futures (the thing you care about) on the right axis. Watch what happens when the blue line pushes well above or well below zero — those are the moments the border flow is telling you something unusual is forming in the supply pipeline. Today both lines are inside their normal ranges.
COMPOSITE
-0.0 / 100
STATE
Normal
PHASE
0
FWD 60d
-2.10% (baseline +0.05%)
SAMPLE N
9,048 days
TODAY’S PLAYBOOK READING
STATE
NORMAL
Reading
-0.044 in the NORMAL band, 33 days running. Canadian feeder-pig flows into US finishing yards are tracking right on their modern-era (2010+) average — no leading supply signal in either direction. Contributing roughly -0.010 to today’s composite — essentially zero.
Why it matters
Canadian weanlings are five to six months upstream of US pork supply. When their flow shifts meaningfully, US Lean Hogs tend to move in the opposite direction a season later. Clean tradable-benchmark back-test shows a spread of about 3 percentage points between the collapsing-imports band (-2.38% fwd60d) and the surging-imports band (-5.13% fwd60d) — modest, directionally correct, and the reason the signal earns its 22% seat in the composite.
Posture
Neutral from this signal. It is a 22% weight input into the LH Supply Census Composite — act on the composite reading, not this one component. Today the composite is STRONG BEARISH, but the bearish signal is coming from the futures curve and hog-corn feed margin, not from this border input.
WHAT THE CHART SHOWS
The composite sits at -0.044 in the Normal band. Canadian feeder-pig imports are tracking essentially on their five-year average. The signal is in listen-mode, not act-mode. What would move it next is the monthly USDA ERS release — a sharp drop or jump in Canadian imports would pull the reading toward a bullish or bearish lean five to six months before that supply hits US packing plants.
TOP INPUTS FIRING
- Primary composite -0.044 State Normal; signal in listen-mode, not act-mode
- Raw z-score -0.04 Year-over-year change in Canadian live swine imports, z-scored on 5-year window, sign-flipped
- Pipeline lead time 5-6 months Weanlings crossing the border today become US market hogs next spring
THE TAKEAWAY
What this means for you today
If you already have a view on Lean Hogs
This signal is NOT giving you an active input today. Reading is -0.044, state is NORMAL, 33 trading days running. Canadian border traffic is tracking right on its modern average — no leading supply story is forming out of the border pipeline in either direction. Whatever view you brought to the market from the futures curve, the hog-corn feed margin, basis, or cold storage — act on those; this signal is on the sidelines. If any future USDA release shows a sharp drop or jump in flows, this signal will move out of neutral and begin contributing to the composite.
How to trade this signal
Not standalone. This signal lives inside the LH Supply Census Composite at 22% weight. The composite — not this signal — is what you would consider acting on, and only when the composite as a whole is giving a sized read (today it is: STRONG BEARISH, driven by the other two members). On its own, this signal has a modest band-spread edge (~3 percentage points between the collapsing and surging bands) that is useful inside a blended composite but not strong enough to size a trade on alone.
THE REGIME MAP
The three states, forward returns and sample share
Three bands sit on this signal, measured against the CME Lean Hogs back-adjusted tradable return over the modern 2010+ sample where HS-code swine import data is clean. Collapsing Imports (deeply positive reading, 15.7% of days) delivers an average fwd60d of -2.38%. Normal (73.8% of days, today’s band) delivers -2.10%. Surging Imports (deeply negative reading, 10.4% of days) delivers -5.13%. All three bands look negative because the baseline modern Lean Hogs tradable return is itself negative (futures markets with persistent contango can deliver negative total returns on back-adjusted series regardless of the signal). The useful information is in the spread, not the level: a surging-imports regime historically underperforms a collapsing-imports regime by roughly 3 percentage points over the next 60 trading days, which is the directional relationship the physical mechanism predicts. Small-sample caveat applies — about 3,470 trading days of history, meaningful but modest.
| State | Phase | Share | Fwd 60d | HAC t | Edge vs baseline | Last firings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collapsing imports | +1 | 15.7% (1425 d) | +2.35% | +0.75pp | Aug 2026, Dec 2025, Apr 2025 | |
| Normal TODAY | 0 | 73.8% (6680 d) | +2.17% | +0.57pp | Sep 2026, Mar 2026, Aug 2025 | |
| Surging imports | -1 | 10.4% (944 d) | +1.72% | +0.13pp | May 2024, Dec 2021, Nov 2020 |
Thresholds are tuned on a rolling five-year standard-deviation window. Band breakpoints shown are post sign-flip, so positive values correspond to bullish-Lean-Hogs readings.
THE TRACK RECORD
State changes
| State | Start | End | Duration | Fwd 60d LH |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Normal | 10/29/2024 | 04/14/2025 | 115d | +3.91% |
| Imports Collapsing | 04/15/2025 | 08/14/2025 | 84d | +16.22% |
| Normal | 08/15/2025 | 12/15/2025 | 85d | +5.91% |
| Imports Collapsing | 12/16/2025 | 03/17/2026 | 62d | -1.45% |
| Normal | 03/18/2026 | 08/14/2026 | 104d | +12.14% |
| Imports Collapsing | 08/17/2026 | 09/14/2026 | 20d | |
| Normal | 09/15/2026 | 10/29/2026 | 33d |
Scroll inside the table for the full history. Forward 60-day LH is measured from each run’s start date; a reader cannot trade off a start-date they only identify in hindsight, so this is a transparency log, not an alpha claim. Asterisked (*) returns are partial. The run is less than 60 trading days old. The full 60-day comparable fills in as more data arrives.
What this measures
We watch one number: how many live swine Canadian producers are shipping into the United States each month, as reported by USDA. We compare this month’s number to the same month a year ago (year-over-year change), then put that change on a standard-deviation scale against the last five years so that we know what counts as a “big” move for THIS data series — not for pork prices, not for the economy, just for this flow. Then we flip the sign. The intuition: fewer pigs flowing south today means fewer finished hogs reaching US packing plants in five to six months, which usually means a tighter pork market and a tailwind for Lean Hogs futures. Flipping the sign lets the reading match the Lean Hogs direction — positive is bullish, negative is bearish. The score moves slowly because the data is monthly, so you will not see it jump day to day; you will see it drift as the border traffic drifts.
Why it matters
WHY LEAN HOGS TRADERS SHOULD CARE
If you are already trading Lean Hogs, you spend a lot of time looking at near-term supply — slaughter counts, cold storage, pork cutout, hog-corn margin. This signal lives in a different time zone. It tells you what the supply pipeline looks like five to six months from now, based on pigs that physically have not yet grown to market weight. On the handful of occasions in the last decade when Canadian flows collapsed by 20 percent or more year-over-year, US pork tightened into the following spring and Lean Hogs rallied. The point is not that this signal picks tops and bottoms; it is that it sees around a corner that daily slaughter reports cannot.
HOW TO USE THIS SIGNAL TODAY
Today it is telling you nothing. Reading is -0.04, essentially flat, state is NORMAL. That is actually useful information: the supply pipeline looks normal five to six months out, so there is no hidden supply shock about to land. If you were tempted to buy Lean Hogs for a supply-tightness thesis, this signal would politely say "not from the Canadian side." Where you want to watch is the next USDA monthly release. A sharp drop or jump in Canadian imports is what moves this signal out of neutral — small drift does not.
THE HONEST LIMITATION
This is a modest signal on its own. Our back-test shows it has real but small predictive power at the 20-day horizon — statistically significant, but a small effect size. And its "big moves" (very positive or very negative readings) do not separate from middle-of-band readings as cleanly as we would like. That is why we weight it 20 percent inside the LH Supply Census Composite, not 100 percent, and never trade it standalone. It earns its seat by pulling on a time horizon the other three composite members miss, not by hitting home runs.
GO DEEPER
Want the full depth?
The research brief walks the mechanism (Canadian weanling pig imports from USDA ERS, year-over-year z-scored on a 5-year rolling window, sign-flipped so falling imports read bullish Lean Hogs), the three historical demand-shock cases, the honest B-/F/C validation grade with the modest standalone edge and composite-member sizing rule, and the five-to-six-month biological lead time that makes this signal a leading indicator for next spring’s US pork supply.
Signal consumers and siblings
The LH analytics stack this leading-pipeline signal plugs into. The Canadian feeder-pig flow is one of four members inside the LH Supply Census Composite, paired with hog-corn margin, Lean Hogs front-second basis, and NC heat stress for complete producer-economics coverage.
Not investment advice · The analysis on this page is informational and educational. Signal readings, historical case figures, and empirical statistics are derived from publicly available data and are provided without warranty. Hypothetical performance results have inherent limitations, including the benefit of hindsight. Readers who intend to trade should consult a licensed investment professional and see the research brief for the full disclaimer.
Last refreshed Oct 30, 2026 10:09 AM ET