Pork production will ramp up in the fall. So will hog culling, analysts say.

While slaughterhouses may have returned to pre-pandemic capacities, hog farmers will likely still have to cull large swaths of their herds later this year. Pork consumption rises in the fall and winter, and due to the long life-cycle of pigs, farmers began inseminating sows to meet that high demand as early as January—before the potential impacts of the Covid-19 emergency on the food supply became apparent. For now, processors are using the slacker summer months to catch-up on spring’s backlog, HuffPost reports. But once production ramps up—and that near-certain “second wave” of coronavirus hits—producers will be looking at culling around 2.5 million pigs by the end 2020, industry analysts estimate.