China made a rare purchase of U.S. wheat and is on track to make record overall purchases this year. Domestic consumption of wheat has been growing at a 2.6 percent annual rate at the same time domestic production is increasing by 0.66 percent. Exacerbating the situation this year is excessive rains reducing part of its crop to feed quality. Now it needs more imported milling quality wheat to blend up its supplies. One question is why the wheat is being largely sourced from the West? Australia is logical due to its proximity and has supplied about 60 percent of its imports thus far. Now China is reportedly looking to the U.S., Canada, and France. Russia is the logical supplier based on their geopolitical alliance, and Moscow claims t...
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: Markets got a surprise with a corn yield of 181.2 bushels/acre in the October WASDE, above the average estimate of 177.6 bushels/acre and up from USDA’s September estimate of 178.5 bushels/acre. Although stronger demand is expected to absorb some of the addit...