Employee Benefits

9 Months Ended

Sep. 29, 2012

Employee Benefits

Employee Benefits

Note 6 – Employee Benefits

Seaboard maintains two defined benefit pension plans for its domestic salaried and clerical employees.  At this time, no contributions are expected to be made to these plans in 2012.  Seaboard also sponsors non-qualified, unfunded supplemental executive plans, and unfunded supplemental retirement agreements with certain executive employees. Management has no plans to provide funding for these supplemental plans in advance of when the benefits are paid.

The net periodic benefit cost for all of these plans was as follows:

	Three Months Ended		Nine Months Ended
	September 29,	October 1,	September 29,	October 1,
(Thousands of dollars)	2012	2011	2012	2011
Components of net periodic benefit cost:
Service cost	$    2,221	$   1,840	$  6,657	$  5,572
Interest cost	2,220	2,243	6,655	6,786
Expected return on plan assets	(1,608)	(1,616)	(4,817)	(4,935)
Amortization and other	1,550	1,012	4,647	3,055
Settlement	-	-	1,796	-
Net periodic benefit cost	$    4,383	$  3,479	$14,938	$10,478

During June 2012 when the actual pension costs for 2012 were finalized, it was determined that a settlement payment made in March 2012 was greater than the actual service cost and interest cost components of the 2012 net periodic pension cost for a non-qualified, unfunded supplemental executive plan.  As a result, during the second quarter of 2012 a settlement loss of $1,796,000 was recorded in the Pork division’s results of operations.