Farmgate to Palengke: Who Gets the Rest of the ₱372?

A kilo of liempo cost ₱372 at the stalls BAI monitors in the week of 14 September 2026. The newest official figure for what the raiser was paid is still June's: ₱171.76 a kilo liveweight, PSA's national farmgate survey. PSA has not published July, August or September yet, and says it will on 6 November 2026. The Department of Agriculture has not waited. It told the Manila Times in late September that the national liveweight price was about ₱150 a kilo in August.

Put those numbers beside each other and every pig 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. What it does say has got more interesting since June.

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.

This site carries all four as downloadable series with the date somebody actually opened the source on every row: pig 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.

Notice the gap in the dates. The retail end of the chain is current to September. The farm end stops at June. That lag of about four months is PSA's publishing rhythm right now, not a missing file, and it matters more than usual this year because the DA and the trade both say June was not the bottom.

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. I 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 DA's August ₱150, put through the same conversion, is about ₱200.

The chain, one link at a time

Here is the whole thing on a single kilo of carcass, using BAI's week of 14 September 2026. The first column uses PSA's June farmgate figure because it is the newest official one. The second uses the DA's August figure because it is closer in time. Neither is a perfect match for a September week, and that is the honest state of the data.

In the week of 6 July, the week this article was first built on, wholesale was ₱260, kasim ₱340 and liempo ₱380. In ten weeks the wholesale carcass came down ₱10. Kasim at the BAI stalls went up ₱4. Liempo came down ₱8.

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 did not support it through June. The whole distance from the raiser's carcass-equivalent value to the wholesale carcass price was ₱31 a kilo in the week of 6 July, 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.

But since June there is a real question here, and I would rather name it than wave it away. If the DA is right that raisers were getting about ₱150 a kilo liveweight in August, then a carcass worth about ₱200 at the farm was wholesaling at ₱250. That is a ₱50 step, nearly double anything in the four years before it. Two cautions before anybody shares that number. It sets a DA statement against a BAI price, two publishers measuring different things. And the trade's own regional figures for August, as reported by BusinessMirror, ran from about ₱132 in the Visayas and Mindanao to about ₱154 in Luzon, so "the" farmgate price depends a great deal on where you stand. The test is PSA's July to September figures on 6 November. If they land near ₱150, the middle of the chain took a bigger slice of the fall than it has taken at any point in this archive.

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 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 pig 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. ₱94 a kilo on kasim, ₱122 on liempo, in mid-September.

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 ₱372 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 September 2026 those printed ₱338.23 for liempo, ₱321.34 for kasim, ₱293.04 for pork with bones and ₱273.79 for fore pata. The unweighted mean of the four came to about ₱307, sixty-five pesos under the BAI 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 my own arithmetic, 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 last row is weaker still, because its farmgate figure is the DA's spoken August number and not a PSA survey result; it is there to show which way the direction is heading, and it gets replaced with a PSA row once PSA publishes August. The direction is the point: the raiser's share of the retail peso fell about eight points between June 2025 and June 2026, and on the DA's figure it has kept falling.

Which link actually moved

This is the question this article was built to answer, so here it is over four years rather than one week. Both columns are my own computation from the archive's 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 was flat through June. Four years, a pandemic-era hangover, an ASF wave, a record import year, and the assembly-and-slaughter step never moved out of a ₱22 to ₱29 band. Whatever was wrong with this industry in the first half of 2026, it was not that the traders got greedier. Whether that held through the third quarter is the open question above, and PSA answers it in November.

The second column is the story. It sat in the high twenties and low thirties for three years, went to ₱45, and has stayed there. And it did not widen because retail rose. Retail fell: PSA's pork-with-bones price came off its 2025 level and has gone on falling, from about ₱302 in July to about ₱293 in September. It widened because farmgate and wholesale fell faster, and the stall price simply did not chase them down.

The spread since June, in two numbers

This is the part of the chain that changed while PSA's farmgate table sat still.

The DA says the national liveweight price fell to about ₱150 a kilo in August 2026, from ₱215 in June 2025. The industry now puts its cost of production at ₱180 to ₱190 a kilo, so that is a price well below cost. Against PSA's June figure of ₱171.76, ₱150 is a fall of about 13% in two months.

Over roughly the same stretch, PSA's national retail kasim went from about ₱332 in July to about ₱321 in September, and liempo from about ₱349 to about ₱338. About 3% each. At the BAI-monitored stalls in Metro Manila, kasim was ₱344 in mid-September, higher than it was in early July.

So farmgate, on the DA's word, fell by something like a seventh, and the shelf fell by about a thirtieth. The gap between them is the spread, and on the DA's figure it is wider than in any of the years in the tables above.

Why the farmgate price fell is argued two ways, and both deserve a hearing. The DA's Secretary Tiu Laurel has blamed an ASF-fear selloff, raisers dumping pigs early before disease could reach them, and pointed out that Mindanao fell too despite taking few imports. SINAG blames imports. That fight is covered properly in imported pork and your farmgate price. Neither explanation, notably, says anything about why the stall price did not follow.

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 ₱372 go?

In the week of 14 September 2026, per kilo of carcass, roughly:

• ₱200 to ₱229 to the raiser, depending on whether you go by the DA's August figure or PSA's June one. Out of that, feed alone takes the majority, and at ₱180 to ₱190 a kilo liveweight to produce, most raisers selling at either figure are selling below cost. What sets the price of that feed sack is its own argument and it is the one most likely to move your bottom line.
• ₱21 to ₱50 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.
• ₱94 to ₱122 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 was getting rich on your pig through June. The chain is short by international standards and its middle was thin. What changed in the first half of 2026 was not that somebody started taking more. It was that the thing you are paid went down 17% year on year while everything downstream held its price. What may have changed since is that the middle stopped passing the fall straight back to you, and that is a claim worth checking against the November figures before anybody repeats it as fact.

If you want somebody to be angry at, start with the price you are paid. And then go read what actually happened to that price, because the popular answer there is also incomplete.

What you can actually do with this

Know your carcass-equivalent before the viajero arrives. Divide the newest 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. Right now that "newest figure" is either PSA's June number or a trade or DA figure for a later month; say which one you are using when you argue. The 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. It is also the only published price that reached September while PSA's farmgate table was still on June.

Sell into the step you can reach. The ₱94 to ₱122 retail block is the fattest 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 an ₱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 behaved from 2023 to mid-2026. If it starts climbing, the middle of the chain is taking more and you have grounds to push; on the DA's August figure it would be about 1.25. 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 raiser actually gets.