World Perspectives
livestock

Bye Bye Black Sheep

New Zealand famously is a country with more sheep than people, but the competition is slipping in favor of humans. The problem is the economics of wool, which is no longer an economically supportive coproduct. Wool is less needed in a warming world with many man-made alternative fibers, and landowners make more money converting grasslands to carbon credit paying forests.   Wool production in New Zealand and in the rest of the world is in decline. While sheep meat output in New Zealand declines along with that of wool, global sheep meat has been expanding. However, it is falling behind the expansion rate of competing animal proteins such as poultry meat. Lamb consumption has always had a smaller group of fans, based on historic ge...

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Cold Storage Report: Up over Last Month, Down on the Year

The Cold Storage report for January showed that red meat and poultry supplies rose from the month ending December, but total supplies are down from a year ago and well below the 5-year average. Total supplies were 1.878 billion pounds, down 2.5 percent from a year ago. This indicates a tighteni...

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livestock

Cold Storage Report: Up over Last Month, Down on the Year

The Cold Storage report for January showed that red meat and poultry supplies rose from the month ending December, but total supplies are down from a year ago and well below the 5-year average. Total supplies were 1.878 billion pounds, down 2.5 percent from a year ago. This indicates a tighteni...

livestock

Hog and Pork Outlook

The recent volatility in lean hog futures — from fresh contract highs at the end of January to the dramatic early-February selloff — has many in the industry (and WPI clients) wondering what will happen next. WPI’s latest analysis indicates that while pork demand remains stron...

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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.

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