Livestock China’s Live Hog Supply Improves for 10th Consecutive Month July figures from China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) show the country’s reproductive sow inventory ticked up by 4 percent from June. Similarly, the total live hog inventory increased by 4.8 percent this past month. That marks ten consecutive months of growth for both reproductive sows and total live hogs. Farming operations also continued to recover in July. A total of 2,916 new hog farms were completed last month, bringing the total thus far in 2020 to just over 9,000 new entities. This expansion is quite significant given the large number of small and medium-sized operations that exited in late 2018 and throughout 2019 during th...
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.