"It appears China has stopped buying soybeans from the US altogether because of trade fight"

Soybeans are used as a major food source for pigs and there are reasons to think China has hit "peak pork" so the country doesn't need as much feed, regardless of source. This is what we were getting at in last week's "China and Pigs and Soybeans: It's Complicated" although I am told I didn't explain the thinking as well as I should have. More after the jump.

From CNBC, May 2:

• "Whatever they're buying is non-U.S.," Soren Schroder, CEO of New York-based Bunge, the world's largest oilseeds processor, told Bloomberg in a phone interview.
• China canceled a net 62,690 metric tons of U.S. soybean purchases in the two weeks ended April 19, the Bloomberg article pointed out, citing USDA data for the current marketing year.
• The country is the second largest market for U.S. agricultural exports, and soybeans have historically have been one of the top products sold to the Asian giant, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service.

China is apparently no longer buying U.S. soybeans amid the rise in trade tensions, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

"Whatever they're buying is non-U.S.," Soren Schroder, CEO of New York-based Bunge, the world's largest oilseeds processor, told the news outlet in a phone interview. "They're buying beans in Canada, in Brazil, mostly Brazil, but very deliberately not buying anything from the U.S."

A Bunge representative did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
China canceled a net 62,690 metric tons of U.S. soybean purchases in the two weeks ended April 19, the Bloomberg article pointed out, citing USDA data for the current marketing year.
Soybean futures fell 1 percent Wednesday, but are up 8 percent on the year.

In response to the Trump administration's proposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, China's Ministry of Commerce announced duties in early April on 106 U.S. products, including soybeans. No effective date was announced at the time....MORE

For years we've marveled at what The Economist once called 'The Empire of the Pig' and were able to forecast the purchase of the largest US pork processor, Smithfield, as a result of all that marveling.

Then last year we started seeing stories similar to this at Fortune, June 20: "Increasingly Affluent Chinese Want Healthier Food and that Has Big Implications for Meat Producers".

Here's the ten second tutorial on Ag cycles, first posted in 2008:

The Hog Cycle
No not Harley-Davidson, although I imagine some econ grad student has written the paper.
Wheat and hogs are two commodities with long price series. We mentioned the hog cycle back in January:

The hog price series is one of the longest we have records for, back to the 1200's. The cycle is:
slaughter begets scarcity begets higher prices begets breeding begets over-supply begets slaughter. It's been going on for a while....

And some of the the more recent stuff, March 3:

"China Unveils How It Will Retaliate To US Tariffs, USDJPY Snaps"

If I was a pig in the Midwest I'd be tempted to vote for Donald Trump in 2020.
And I'm not talking deplorables.
As my favorite translator of Mandarin tells me, Chinese people love pork. And we've been babbling on about China's Strategic Pork Reserve for over a decade. Here's 2010's '"...Pork Signals Record Meat Prices' and China's Strategic Pork Reserve (SFD)":

I just threw Smithfield's symbol into the headline, neither story directly mention's the country's largest hog and pork producer. We first mentioned the Strategic Pork Reserve in an October 2007 post "Is China Going to Own the World?".

As it turned out, Smithfield was purchased by China's largest protein processor, Shuanghui International Holdings (now WH Group), in 2013 in a move that triggered a national security review in the U.S., I kid you not,

Anyhoo, China has been playing power politics for something like 5000 years and should President Trump go through with the threatened tariffs the Chinese will strike directly at his base while the porkers breathe a little easier as a major export market is taken off the table, so to speak....

Pork prices, with the exception of 2014 have been trading between $60 and $100 for a decade:

In 2014 you had the American bacon binge (2011 - 2014) combined with  porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PED).
When it was realized PED was not as deadly as rumored/feared (but still quite messy) prices came back down.
Finally both the stock price and comments of China's largest soy buyer, New Hope Group belie the headline of Bloomberg's March 3 story "China Pig Feed King Says U.S. Trade War Will Hurt":

..."In case of a trade war, we are able to find other solutions," said Liu, who is also chairman of New Hope Liuhe, a publicly traded animal feed producer controlled by New Hope Group. “We have to raise pigs, and citizens have to eat pork.”...

It seems to be more a logistics problem than a scarcity situation.