Macroeconomics Food Prices Up Nearly 5 Percent In December For the ninth straight month, the average cost of food across various categories climbed. It was up 4.8 percent this past December from a year ago. That is up from the increase in November, which amounted to an annualized uptick of 3.7 percent. With hog prices seeing a sharp decline, the average price of pork meat rose year-on-year by 22.2 percent last month, which was down from a 34.4 percent rise in November. Fresh vegetables continued to decline, edging down 8 percent. In contrast, fresh fruit, milk, eggs, and cooking oils were up last month by 11 percent, 1.2 percent, 9.6 percent, and 7.2 percent, respectively. With food prices edging up, inflation on an annual basis ros...
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...
The USDA has lowered its 2026 red meat production forecasts slightly while forecasting a slight increase in broiler production. Beef is now projected at 24.802 billion pounds, 75 million pounds less than in September. Cow slaughter is expected to be up; however, this will be offset by lower ste...
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.