While countries like Brazil and Ukraine are trying to consolidate farmland in order to gain efficiencies, Australia has always had some of the largest farms in the world. However, consolidation reached a peak in 2010 and the consolidation curve has flattened or even slightly declined. Like the U.S., part of the reason could be greater specialization, plus an increase in so-called hobby farming. With Australia, there are also the potential impacts of more frequent drought on land holdings. Once farms reach economies of scale, the more critical objective becomes the application of innovative technologies. Australia, together with the U.S. and Canada are considered the precursor countries in the adoption of precision agriculture and con...
Russian Grain Markets: 29 June-3 July 2026 The new marketing season has officially begun in Russia, although bearish sentiment has been concentrated in the southern regions closest to the Black Sea ports, where export demand has been weakest. Delays in grain deliveries to inland elevators have...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
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.