LM_PK602 is the National Daily Pork Report FOB Plant, Negotiated Sales, published by USDA Agricultural Marketing Service every trading afternoon (report 2498 in the datamart numbering). It is the pork market's daily settle: the carcass cutout value, the six primal values, and the item-by-item prints for every negotiated pork cut that traded. If you read one pork document a day, this is it. An earlier intraday edition runs at midday; the afternoon print is the number the trade quotes.
Everything in the report is FOB plant, negotiated, in US dollars per hundredweight. FOB plant means at the packer's dock before freight. Negotiated means actual buyer-seller price discovery that day, not formula or contract volume, so thin negotiated trade on a line means the printed price rests on few transactions.
The top of the report
The report opens with the summary and the cutout: the pork carcass cutout value, its change from the prior day, the five-day average, and the load count behind it. The cutout is a calculated composite, the value of a standard hog carcass priced out from the primal values, and it plays the same benchmark role for pork that the Choice cutout plays for beef. Beneath it sit the six primal values: loin, butt, picnic, rib, ham, and belly, each with its daily change. This is where a one-line read of the pork day lives: the cutout tells you the whole animal, the primal lines tell you which parts drove it. A cutout move that is all belly is a completely different market from the same move spread across ham and loin.
The item sections
The rest of the report is the item detail, organized by section: Loin Cuts, Butt Cuts, Picnic Cuts, Ham Cuts, Belly Cuts, Sparerib Cuts, Jowl Cuts, Trim Cuts, Variety Cuts, and Added Ingredient Cuts. Each item line carries the weighted average price, the traded range, and the pounds behind it. The section headers are the authoritative answer to which primal a pork item belongs to; when a name is ambiguous (the skinned and skin-on lines, for instance, which sit under Jowl), the section settles it.
Two reading habits matter. First, volume: a line printing on a couple of loads can gap dollars for reasons that say nothing about the market, so weight the heavy lines (the trimmed loin combos, the derind bellies, the trimmed selected hams) far more than the thin ones. Second, dashes: an item that shows no price simply didn't trade negotiated that day, which for minor lines is normal and means nothing.
Where this data lives on this site
Every price surface on Meat Read's pork side is built from this report and its history: the pork carcass benchmark in the top strip, the cut prices pages organized by the report's own primal sections, and the per-cut charts with their seasonal overlays. The daily prints land shortly after USDA publishes, so the afternoon settle you would pull from the PDF is on the site by early evening with the day-over-day and seasonal context already computed.