Macroeconomics Food Inflation Reverses Course, Falls in December With pork prices continuing to remain well below their averages from a year ago, food costs on aggregate fell by 1.2 percent in December. That reverses course from November when food inflation climbed by 1.6 percent, the first uptick since May. The cost of pork dropped by 36.7 percent year-on-year last month, as the November rally in live hog prices ended. Meanwhile, other categories saw their average prices rise from a year ago, albeit at a slower pace than in November. These included fresh vegetables, cooking oil, and eggs, which jumped by 10.6 percent, 6.4 percent, and 12.7 percent from December 2020. In contrast, fresh fruit prices, which rose by 4.8 percent from a year...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
Let’s return briefly to the fake meat hype cycle, now sitting somewhere in a dusty corner of your mind, not entirely forgotten. What happened to all those products, known as plant-based alternative proteins? They were supposed to be as good as real meat—cheaper, more environmentally...
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.