Regional News Ukraine’s UGA grain traders’ union said it looks for the country’s wheat harvest to fall 45 percent to 18.2 MMT this year and that corn production could fall 38 percent to 23.1 MMT. A favorable shift in weather conditions will aid Ukraine’s newly-planted spring crops and likely aid in seeding additional area (where fuel restrictions and various implications of the war, like land mines, will allow). Russian farmers have seeded spring crops on 0.563 Mha so far, up from 0.36 Mha this time last year, aided by favorable weather. Since the end of November 2021, more than 13 million poultry birds have been culled in France due to bird flu outbreaks. Through 8 April, France has repor...
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...
In agriculture and food processing, we think a lot about infrastructure: transportation and storage, processing and packaging, distribution and delivery. It is a physical system of roads, railroads, and rivers; concrete and steel storage; processing plants, warehouses, and machinery; and, event...
Key Takeaways: The Panama Canal’s draft restrictions and decreasing rainfall outlook are driving big moves in dry bulk markets this week. Panamax markets are sharply lower as the economics of moving freight across the Canal are deteriorating rapidly, leading to support in Supramax vessels...
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.