April Trading Volume Falls on Lower Feed Demand Following a blistering first quarter, futures trading volume on the Dalian Commodities Exchange (DCE) fell by nearly 19 percent to kick-off the second quarter of 2021. Across all ten agricultural futures categories (this analysis excludes fiberboard and blockboard, which comprise the DCE’s agricultural futures products), monthly trading volume in April was down from March. Leading the decline were futures contracts for live hogs, eggs, round grain rice, and soymeal, which saw their volumes decline by 38.8 percent, 32 percent, 31.9 percent, and 23.5 percent, respectively. In total, monthly volume amounted to nearly 102.86 million lots. Soymeal, soyoil, RBD (refined, bleached, and deodor...
What You Need to Know Today: Markets got a surprise with a corn yield of 181.2 bushels/acre in the October WASDE, above the average estimate of 177.6 bushels/acre and up from USDA’s September estimate of 178.5 bushels/acre. Although stronger demand is expected to absorb some of the addit...
The USDA has lowered its 2026 red meat production forecasts slightly while forecasting a slight increase in broiler production. Beef is now projected at 24.802 billion pounds, 75 million pounds less than in September. Cow slaughter is expected to be up; however, this will be offset by lower ste...
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.