We’re a week out from the April Cattle on Feed report; as noted on 25 March, the 1 March Cattle on Feed report showed record monthly inventories for the second month in a row, but the overall herd is declining. USDA’s annual cattle inventory report showed the total herd down 2 percent to 91.9 million head, with feeder cattle and replacement heifers down 3 percent. Soon, cattle on feed inventory will be tight. We’ll soon have a peak into the quarterly number of feeder cattle outside of feedlots. January was the lowest number since 2015. Drought conditions and heifer placements are likely to push down the April number to a similar level. Auction receipts last week were about 44,000 head below last year, and there is not a l...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
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.