Farmgate to Palengke: Who Gets the Rest of the ₱380?

A kilo of liempo cost ₱380 at the stalls BAI monitors in the week of 6 July 2026. The pig it came off was sold by somebody at ₱171.76 a kilo liveweight, which is what PSA's national farmgate survey printed for June 2026.

Put those two numbers beside each other and every hog raiser in this country has the same reaction. Where does the rest go?

The answer is published. It has been published every week for years, in a PDF nobody reads, and it does not say what the Facebook groups say it does.

The four prices, and where each one comes from

Nobody in this country publishes "the pork price". Four different organisations publish four different things, at three different market levels, and the arguments happen because people quote across the levels without saying so.

We publish all four as downloadable series with the date somebody actually opened the source on every row: hog farmgate, wholesale sabit ulo, retail kasim and retail liempo. The wholesale one is the interesting one. Almost nobody publishes it, and it is the only window there is onto the middle of the chain.

Convert first, argue second

The farmgate number is a live pig. The retail number is a cut of meat. They are not the same kilo and they never were.

A Philippine commercial or crossbred pig dresses out at roughly 72% to 78% of liveweight. We worked that through properly in liveweight versus dressed weight, including the ways a buyer can shade the yield in their own favour, and there is no reason to do it twice. Use 75% as the working midpoint.

So: ₱171.76 a kilo liveweight, divided by 0.75, is about ₱229 a kilo of carcass. That is the raiser's contribution to the meat, priced the way the rest of the chain prices it.

The chain, one link at a time

Here is the whole thing on a single kilo of carcass, using the week of 6 July 2026 and PSA's June farmgate figure.

That is the arithmetic. Now the part that matters, which is what sits inside each of those steps and who is actually holding it.

The viajero, the biyahero, and the truck

The pig does not walk to the abattoir. Somebody comes to the farm, argues about the weight, loads the animal, drives it, and carries the risk that it arrives lighter or does not arrive at all. In most of the country that somebody is a viajero or biyahero, and in many barangays they are also the only buyer who will come at all.

PIDS put this to commercial farm operators in 2021 and got an earful. Its benchmarking study records that "the presence of viajeros remained one of the biggest challenges for both commercial and backyard hog raisers", and that the farms interviewed "lamented that the majority of the net sales goes to these viajeros instead of the producers".

The majority. That is the claim, from named interviews, in a government think tank's own paper.

The published weekly prices do not support it. The whole distance from the raiser's carcass-equivalent value to the wholesale carcass price was ₱31 a kilo in that July week, on a ₱260 carcass. Not a majority of anything. About twelve per cent, and out of that twelve per cent comes the diesel, the loading crew, the mortality, the shrink between the farm scale and the abattoir scale, and the money the trader has tied up for a week.

I am not saying the farms were lying to PIDS. I am saying the thing they experience as "the majority of the net sales" is the difference between the price they wanted and the price they got, and that is a different quantity from the trader's margin.

The abattoir, which is the cheapest step and the most complained about

Local governments publish their slaughter fees. They are in the citizen's charters, they are boring, and they settle this argument in about a minute.

Cavite City's slaughterhouse charges a hog slaughter fee of ₱60.00 a head, a pre-slaughter fee of ₱3.00 and a corral fee of ₱2.00 a day. Naga City's district abattoir charges ₱90.60 for a hog in the 91-120 kg band, plus a ₱10.00 daily permit and ₱8.00 for ante-mortem inspection.

Call it ₱65 to ₱110 a head all-in. On a 75 kg carcass that is between ₱0.87 and ₱1.47 a kilo.

The stall

Everything left over is the retail step, and it is the biggest single block in the table. ₱80 a kilo on kasim, ₱120 on liempo.

Out of it comes the market stall rental, the ice, the helper, the cutting loss, the bones and trim that never sell at liempo prices, and the meat that does not sell at all on a slow Tuesday. A vendor buys a whole carcass and has to clear all of it. That is a genuinely different business from selling one cut.

Which brings up the trap in the ₱380 itself.

Liempo is not the pig

A pig is not made of liempo. It is the cut people photograph, it is the cut in every price headline, and it is the most expensive thing the vendor is holding.

PSA publishes four pork cuts, which is the closest thing this country has to a picture of the whole carcass. For July 2026 those printed ₱349.10 for liempo, ₱332.07 for kasim, ₱302.43 for pork with bones and ₱278.27 for fore pata. The unweighted mean of the four came to about ₱315, sixty-five pesos under the liempo headline.

Take that mean as a rough stand-in for what a carcass actually realises at retail, and the picture changes shape:

The four-cut mean is ours, not PSA's. It is unweighted, which means it treats liempo and fore pata as equally large parts of a pig, and they are not. Treat it as a direction, not a statistic. The direction is the point: the raiser's share of the retail peso fell about eight points between June 2025 and June 2026.

Which link actually moved

This is the question the brief-case version of this article was built to answer, so here it is over four years rather than one week. Both columns are computed by us from the archive's own rows: step one is BAI's wholesale carcass price minus the PSA backyard farmgate figure converted at 75%, step two is PSA's pork-with-bones retail price minus the same wholesale carcass price, both averaged over every month that carries all the pieces.

The first column is flat. Four years, a pandemic-era hangover, an ASF wave, a record import year, and the assembly-and-slaughter step never moves out of a ₱22 to ₱29 band. Whatever is wrong with this industry, it is not that the traders got greedier in 2026.

The second column is the story. It sat in the high twenties and low thirties for three years and then went to ₱45. And it did not widen because retail rose. Retail fell — PSA's pork-with-bones price came off its 2025 level. It widened because farmgate fell faster, and the stall price simply did not chase it down.

That is not a conspiracy. It is what retail prices do everywhere: they are sticky downward. The vendor who dropped their price the week farmgate dropped would be the vendor who could not raise it back. Sus, nobody in a wet market is going to volunteer for that.

So where does the ₱380 go?

On the week of 6 July 2026, per kilo of carcass, roughly:

• ₱229 to the raiser, out of which feed alone takes the majority. What sets the price of that feed sack is its own argument and it is the one most likely to move your bottom line.
• ₱31 to everything between the farm gate and the wholesale carcass, of which about a peso is the government's slaughter fee and the rest is the truck, the trader, the shrink and the risk.
• ₱80 to ₱120 to the stall, depending on which cut you are looking at, out of which comes rent, ice, labour, cutting loss and unsold meat.

Nobody in that chain is getting rich on your pig. The chain is short by international standards and its middle is thin. What has changed is not that somebody started taking more. It is that the thing you are paid went down 17% year on year in the first half of 2026 while everything downstream held its price.

If you want somebody to be angry at, be angry at the price you are paid, not the people handling the meat afterwards. And then go read what actually happened to that price, because the popular answer there is also wrong.

What you can actually do with this

Know your carcass-equivalent before the viajero arrives. Divide the newest published farmgate figure for your province by 0.75. That is your number in the currency the rest of the chain thinks in. If a dressed-basis offer comes in under it, you now know by exactly how much. Our break-even calculator will tell you whether that offer clears your own cost, which is the only comparison that pays anybody.

Watch the wholesale carcass line, not the retail headline. The retail price is a lagging, sticky, cut-specific number and it will tell you nothing about next month. The wholesale sabit ulo series moves within a week or two of farmgate, in both directions, and it is published free every week.

Sell into the step you can reach. The ₱80 to ₱120 retail block is the only fat part of this chain, and a raiser with a freezer, a permit and a Saturday can take a slice of it directly. That is not a small undertaking and it is not for everybody. How to sell pigs walks through the channels honestly, including the ones that are more trouble than they are worth. It is also the one move that is available to a smallholder and not to a commercial farm, which matters more than it used to now that the smallhold sector holds four fifths of the national herd.

Check your own province before you accept anything. The national figure is an average across a country with a ₱80 spread in it, and the regional table is where your actual negotiating position lives.

Stop comparing your liveweight price to a liempo price. It is the single most common mistake in every price argument in this industry, it makes you feel robbed, and it will lose you a negotiation because the buyer knows the conversion and you do not.

Ang biyahero dili imong kaaway. Ang presyo nga gibayad kanimo, mao nay problema.

One number worth writing down every month

Open the BAI weekly report, find the wholesale sabit ulo figure, and divide it by your own province's newest farmgate figure converted at 75%.

If that ratio sits near 1.13, the chain is behaving the way it has behaved since 2023. If it starts climbing, the middle of the chain is taking more and you have grounds to push. If it starts falling, the traders are eating the fall before you do, which is usually the week before your own price drops.

It takes a minute a month, and it is the only early warning any of us actually get.