LM_PK600 is the morning edition of USDA's National Daily Pork Report, the early sibling of the afternoon LM_PK602. Both come from the same Livestock Mandatory Reporting pipeline: packers report their negotiated pork sales to USDA, and the Agricultural Marketing Service publishes the aggregated cutout and cut prices, FOB plant, in US dollars per hundredweight.
The difference between the two editions is simply how much of the trading day each one has seen.
What the morning report is
LM_PK600 carries pork cutout values compiled from trade reported as of 9:30 AM. It is a partial-session snapshot: the carcass cutout, the primal values, and the early trade behind them, published while the day is still being made. On a morning when something moved overnight, it is the first official signal of which way pork is leaning.
Why the afternoon print is the settle
The afternoon edition, LM_PK602, carries the full session's negotiated trade, and that makes it the number the trade quotes. When a pork buyer, a packer's sales desk, or a market note says "the cutout," they mean the afternoon print. Charts, historical series, and formula business settle against it. The morning edition is never the reference price; it is the preview.
How a buyer uses each one
The morning report earns its place on days when timing matters. If you have to commit volume before lunch, LM_PK600 is the freshest official read you will get, and a sharp early move in a primal you buy is worth knowing about before your supplier calls. Its weakness is the same as any partial-session number: it rests on the loads that happened to clear early, and thin early trade can lean the cutout in a direction the full session walks back.
The afternoon report is the one to build a record on. Day-over-day comparisons, weekly averages, seasonal history: all of it should run afternoon-print against afternoon-print. Mixing editions in one series quietly compares partial sessions against full ones and produces moves that never happened.
Every pork price on Meat Read runs off the afternoon print for exactly that reason. The daily Read is written after the LM_PK602 close, the charts carry the print-of-record series, and the pork cutout page tracks the afternoon value with its full history. The morning number is a signal to watch; the afternoon number is the one worth keeping.