While the overall trend for corn has been lower, soybean futures stayed in backwardation longer than corn contracts. As confidence grows in new crop prospects, bear spreading increases. But longer deferred corn contracts are currently showing greater relative value than the equivalent soybean contracts. The value of December 2024 corn is 8.4 percent higher than December 2023 corn. By contrast, August 2024 soybeans are only valued 2.6 percent above November 2023 soybeans. Picking different positions can alter the ratios but not enough to change the overall trend. The last time the deferred corn contract showed relatively higher value over the nearby versus comparable soybean contracts was in 2020. ...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.