Tomorrow is “turkey-day” in the U.S. but today the story is beef. Prices are up nearly 30 percent and while the cattle cycle is part of the story, there is little doubt that China is a major contributing factor. While beef imports by the rest of the world are little changed over the past 10-years, China’s beef imports are up nearly nine-fold. With a CAGR of 24 percent, it is unclear global beef suppliers can keep up if this demand growth continues. China’s own beef production slogs along with a 1.3 percent growth rate, which is roughly just a quarter of the rate of expanding domestic consumption. With no surplus meat carryover, import dependency is slated to continue. China now takes the equivalent of half of the be...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.