Friday’s CFTC report showed managed money surprisingly shifting into a more bullish stance across the ag space, though still retaining a small net short. Funds cut 11,700 contacts (14.5 percent) off their small net short across all ag futures last week and now hold relatively neutral position of 69,380 contracts short. short. The neutral positioning is surprising given the weakness in futures that prevailed ahead of last Tuesday’s data reporting deadline. Through last Tuesday’s CFTC reporting deadline, funds were barely bearish the soy complex ...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: Day three of the Pro Farmer Crop Tour found corn yield potential below last year in both Illinois and western Iowa. Illinois corn yields averaged 184.2 bushels/acre, down from 199.6 bushels/acre last year and the 199.2 bushels/acre three-year average, while wester...
The USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) projects China’s chicken imports to drop by 33 percent this year and another 15 percent next year, as domestic production outpaces growing consumption and the country’s own exports surge. In its annual report on the Chinese poultry...
Key Takeaways: $13 billion in new U.S. dairy processing investment is moving across the sector, led by cheese ($3.2 billion), milk and cream ($2.9 billion), and yogurt and cultured dairy ($2.8 billion), with butter-powder capacity ($1.6 billion) and ice cream ($530 million) rounding out the bu...