A number of Chinese crushers have reportedly chosen to suspend operations temporarily for several reasons. Meanwhile, the average crush margin for imported soybeans has been improving nationwide. Oilseeds Soybean Smuggling Operation Update Speculation continues to mount as to whether the soybean smuggling operation revealed at the beginning of March is tied to the spring 2014 Marubeni investigation. Moreover, it is not clear whether the four detained employees are the same individuals as those arrested from Shandong Sunrise and Shandong Canghua last year. Another factor that may be in play pertains to Shandong Sunrise's involvement in financial services, which was noted in a 2014 Reuters' article. That company launched its lending operat...
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...
Monday, 25 May is a U.S. holiday, and both the markets and our office will be closed. Please note that the next issue of Ag Perspectives will be published on Tuesday, 26 May. The WPI staff wishes everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend...
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...
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.