The Mindanao Discount: Davao Hog Price, June 2026

Davao Region paid ₱154.49/kg for hogs in June 2026, down ₱19.71 since March, and SOCCSKSARGEN was the cheapest region in the country at ₱141.98/kg. That is the Mindanao discount everyone talks about. Except that BARMM paid ₱190.21/kg in the same month, which is more than Central Luzon.

And inside Davao Region, one province printed 189.50 while the city printed 122.02. Sixty-seven pesos a kilo apart, same region, same month, about 60 km of road between them. There is no such thing as "the Davao price".

All six Mindanao regions, and why the blanket story fails

Two of the six are above the national figure. Four are below it, three of those badly. So the honest version is not "Mindanao is cheap", it is "the southern and western Mindanao surplus belt is cheap, and Caraga and BARMM are not".

One caveat on BARMM that nobody else will give you. Every one of its five reporting provinces prints round numbers, month after month: Basilan at 200, Tawi-tawi at 190, both Maguindanaos at 185, Lanao del Sur at 137. Those are administrative quotes, not survey means, and a regional figure built on five quotes deserves less weight than one built on rows that move. Take BARMM's ₱190.21 as a signal that the region is not in the discount belt, not as a price you could sell into.

Inside Davao Region

Liveweight farmgate, pesos per kilo, all six reporting geolocations.

Davao del Norte cleared the DA's ₱210 floor in March and is still the region's strongest market. Davao Oriental sits above the region. Davao del Sur and the City of Davao are ₱35 to ₱67 below their neighbour.

If your buyer quotes you "the Davao Region price" of ₱154, ask him which row he is reading. In Tagum that number is ₱35 light.

The City of Davao's fall, and what we can honestly say about it

March 186.36. April 156.33. May 123.53. June 122.02. That is ₱64.34 a kilo gone in a quarter, the fifth-largest fall of any Philippine province.

The first question with any figure that dramatic is whether it is real or a data artefact. Here it looks real. The row prints six distinct values in six months, which is what a survey of an actual market looks like, unlike Cebu's or Ifugao's flat carried quotes. The fall is also gradual across three months rather than a single cliff, which is how a market slides rather than how a keying error appears.

The second question is what caused it, and here the honest answer is that we do not know. We searched for a 2026 ASF outbreak, a depopulation order, an abattoir closure or a movement ban in Davao City and found none reported. Davao del Norte's Provincial Veterinarian's Office ran about 500 blood samples across nine LGUs in 2025 and reported all of them negative for ASF and hog cholera. The region's last real ASF episode was 2020, when roughly 3,000 hogs were culled in Calinan and the regional swine inventory fell 8.07%, from 941,256 head to 865,277.

What we can say is structural. The City of Davao is a consuming geolocation with a large commercial slaughter trade, not a production province. A farmgate survey taken there is likely to be dominated by a small number of large commercial sellers moving volume to processors, and a commercial seller with a full pen and a monthly kill schedule takes the price on offer. Davao del Norte, 60 km north, is a production province selling into a different set of buyers.

That is a reading, not a finding. If a Davao City raiser is being paid ₱122 this month, the reason matters less than the arithmetic, which we will get to.

What actually sets the number: surplus, freight, and who is at the other end

Distance from Manila explains almost nothing. Caraga is further from Manila than Davao and paid ₱21 more.

What explains it is that southern Mindanao produces more finished pigs than it eats and cannot cheaply move the surplus to anywhere that would pay more. Davao Region alone held about 941,000 head in 2020, on SunStar Davao's reporting of provincial figures, which was around 73% of Mindanao's hog production at the time. Those are dated numbers and the herd has shrunk nationally since, but the shape has not changed: this is a producing region without a matching local appetite.

When the surplus does move, the terms are set by the buyer. DA-Davao's own regional director made the point years ago and it still holds: Metro Manila processors want prime cuts for tocino and longganisa, so the head, innards, face, skin and feet come off the value of the animal rather than adding to it. A raiser selling into that channel is selling a partial pig at a whole-pig freight cost.

Set against that, the trader margin is the part that has quietly got enormous. NatFed puts the trader and biyahero take at roughly ₱120/kg, which is why farmgate and retail have come apart entirely. Bankerohan Public Market in Davao City was selling belly at ₱350 and kasim at ₱300 a kilo on 19 March 2026. City of Davao's farmgate that month was 186.36, and by June it was 122.02. The farmgate fell ₱64 and there is no sign the market stall price followed it down.

If you have ever wondered why "pork prices are high" headlines never help you, that is the answer, and it is the same answer in Western Visayas, where raisers get ₱160 to ₱170 for pork that retails at ₱300 to ₱360.

PSA says 137.25. The raisers say ₱110. Both are right.

This is the most useful paragraph on the page, so read it slowly.

PSA's South Cotabato figure for June is 137.25. In August 2026 the Inquirer reported hog raisers in the same province being paid ₱110 to ₱120 a kilo, occasionally ₱105, an average of about ₱115 and a fall of at least 20% from the ₱140 to ₱160 they were getting in January.

Those are not contradictory. PSA's series is two months behind: June is the newest published month, July is a published blank for every geography in the country, and August will not appear until October. The trade read is current and it is lower. The direction of travel between them is down.

So the rule for a Mindanao raiser is: treat the PSA row as the ceiling of what you might get, not the floor. In a falling market the official series is a description of two months ago, and two months ago was better than now.

The arithmetic nobody wants to print

Elma Ollola, a South Cotabato farm owner, gave the Inquirer the clearest cost figure in Philippine pig farming this year: about ₱13,000 to raise an 80 kg market hog, which is ₱162 a kilo. That is below the ₱180/kg sector cost of production because a backyard operation does not pay itself wages, and it lines up almost exactly with our own ₱13,000 to ₱16,500 all-in band for a backyard head.

At ₱110/kg an 80 kg hog brings ₱8,800. Against ₱13,000, that is a loss of ₱4,200 a head. Ten head is ₱42,000 gone in one cycle.

Here is the same sum at each Mindanao province's June figure, on a 95 kg pig against a ₱15,000 all-in cost.

Bukidnon is the row that should annoy you most. It is one of the country's five biggest hog provinces, it sits on the corn belt that feeds half of Mindanao, and it is losing money per head. Cheap feed and a weak farmgate turn out to go together, because cheap feed is what lets a region produce the surplus that kills its own price.

Tboli's hog inventory has fallen about 75%, and raisers are quitting rather than restocking. That is the market clearing itself the hard way.

Four things a Mindanao raiser can actually do

1. Attack the feed bill, because that is where you have room to move. Feed is about 57% of hog operating cost on PIDS's figure, and premium grower/finisher ran ₱1,747 to ₱1,910 a 50 kg bag as of July 2026, a mean of ₱36.69/kg. Self-mix on corn, soya and rice bran comes in near ₱24/kg. In Bukidnon, Cotabato or Isabela, where the corn is grown next to you, that gap is the single largest number you control. Our cheapest-way-to-feed guide and the feed economics breakdown have the formulations and the current bag prices.

2. Sell into the meal, not the market. Lechon, fiesta and habal-habal-scale local trade pay per animal rather than per kilo of prime cut, so the head, feet and skin stay in the price instead of being deducted from it. A 30 to 40 kg roaster sold locally can clear more than a 95 kg finisher sold to a processor, and it ties up four months of feed instead of six.

3. Time it, since you cannot move it. December and fiesta demand lift a local price in a way freight never will, and planning the farrowing date backwards from Christmas costs nothing.

4. Stop budgeting on national numbers. The national quarter was ₱172.44/kg. If you are in Sarangani that number is ₱38.60 above your own province, and every projection built on it is roughly ₱3,700 a head optimistic. Use your row. The full provincial ranking has all 86 of them.

The row to watch

Two months from now the August figures print, and the number that will tell you whether southern Mindanao has bottomed is not Davao City's. It is South Cotabato's.

PSA has it at 137.25 for June. The trade was quoting ₱110 to ₱120 in August. If the August row comes in near 137 again, the trade quotes were a bad patch and the survey is catching a wider market. If it comes in near 115, the official series has been describing a market that already moved, and every planning number in the region needs cutting by ₱20 a kilo.

We will run the query either way. The whole provincial series, all 110 geographies back to January 2025, is on our data pages as a CSV with the source URL and access date on every row, and the province grid will draw your own market's last two years in one screen. Check it before you take the next offer.