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You can follow the rising price of bacon by looking at the weekly newspaper ads.

For the reasons why, just turn to the news pages.

Like other farm products, bacon has gone up in price with soaring costs for fuel and animal feed.

The average price of bacon in Arizona was $3.99 per pound in the second quarter, up from $3.69 in the prior quarter and $3.40 in second-quarter of 2007, according to the latest quarterly marketbasket survey from the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation.

Bacon, along with two types of cooking oil, showed the biggest increase in price from the first quarter among 16 basic grocery items in the survey.

"Bacon is expensive right now," bureau spokeswoman Julie Murphree said. "But it is a good source of protein, and it brings a lot of flavor to your foods."

Spiking fuel prices and higher prices for corn — much of which is now grown to make ethanol-based fuel — have pushed hog prices upward.

Hog prices have been pretty stable lately, but that could change in the coming months, said Tom Miller, executive director of the Arizona Pork Council and a retired pork producer.

Miller said some hog farmers in the Midwest have been liquidating their herds in response to skyrocketing corn prices — recently worsened by flooding — and there is talk that that trend will accelerate by year's end.

But corn prices have fallen in the past week, partly due to moderating weather in the Midwest.

Bacon is a cured product that comes from pork bellies, which along with breakfast staples such as coffee and sugar are sold as commodities on the financial markets. Pork-belly prices have taken a hit this summer because of problems with another popular food often linked to bacon: tomatoes.

Futures traders often look forward to the summer because the popularity of lighter fare — including bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches — helps to support prices.

This year, though, the tomato-salmonella scare is combining with seasonal market forces to lead to lower belly prices, Dow Jones Newswires reported in June.

Pork-belly prices as quoted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were as high as $92 per hundredweight as recently as May 29. By June 3, cash values had slid to $76, with the most precipitous drop occurring soon after U.S. health officials announced they were investigating several cases of salmonella food poisoning connected with raw tomatoes.

Pork-belly futures contracts for August settled Thursday at 71.3 cents per pound, or about $71 per hundredweight, according to Bloomberg News. Todd Sumlin / Charlotte Observer