As Gary Blumenthal reported yesterday, efforts are afoot to put a safety net under global crude oil prices. President Trump is communicating with Saudi Arabia and Russia to coordinate a détente in their price and production war, and the so-called OPEC-Plus group, which includes OPEC members and Russia, is set for an emergency video conference on Monday. Yesterday Brent crude futures moved up 21 percent, which in percentage terms is the best day since the contract was launched in 1989. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude closed up 24 percent – also a record. The problem is the rally record is on a percentage basis and the denominator is still very small. Both contracts were down more than 50 percent on the year going into yeste...
What You Need to Know Today: Attacks between the U.S. and Iran intensified overnight and the U.S. Central Command reported that the U.S. naval blockade against Iran will begin at 3:00 PM CDT Tuesday. President Trump said the Strait of Hormuz is open to all shipping traffic, except Iran. In an...
Beef packer margins improved to -$172/head last week, up $31 from the prior week as sharply lower fed cattle prices more than offset a seasonal decline in the Choice cutout. The cutout fell to $382/cwt while fed cattle prices dropped to $248/cwt, allowing packers to recover some of the margin c...
Key Takeaways: Aquaculture is becoming increasingly important in meeting global seafood demand, gaining market share as wild-caught fisheries face production limitations. Superior feed conversion efficiency gives aquaculture a competitive advantage over traditional livestock production, with l...
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.