Brazilian Minister of Agriculture, Tereza Cristina, has stated she’s hopeful Brazil will be shipping beef to China again this month. Brazil’s largest market has been closed now for 90 days since exports were suspended after the notification to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) that two cases of atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) had been discovered at two separate meat plants – one in Mato Grosso and the other in Minas Gerais. Both cases were determined to be atypical cases. BSE can manifest in two forms - classical and atypical. The incubation period for classical BSE from prion infected feed, from time of infection, thought to occur early in life, until the onset of clinical signs a...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
Let’s return briefly to the fake meat hype cycle, now sitting somewhere in a dusty corner of your mind, not entirely forgotten. What happened to all those products, known as plant-based alternative proteins? They were supposed to be as good as real meat—cheaper, more environmentally...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.