There has been much discussion and focus on the weather conditions in South America, and Brazil in particular where it has been dry across the central and southern parts of the country. Heavy rains are also causing crop loss in some of the northern areas. The forecast is for more La Nina effect, and the outlook for Argentina is dry and warm as well. In the U.S., fall rains – including mid-December big storms/tornadoes – in Minnesota and Wisconsin have helped pull much of the dry areas of the western corn belt out of drought conditions, but things remain dry. With weather above normal in December the rains have helped soil moisture; colder weather and freezing for the rest of the winter will slow that process. La Nina coul...
Weather concerns and the impacts of the war in Iran helped push wheat and corn to sharp gains Tuesday, with both markets blowing past key technical resistance levels. The weather is now coupled with geopolitical tensions that look increasingly hard to resolve, which is giving funds the perfect...
Congress is moving forward with its FY 2027 spending bills, while also still working to address FY 2026 funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is still in a shutdown. The House Agriculture-FDA Appropriations Subcommittee marked up and passed its FY 2027 bill. The House bill prov...
Update for 6 April 2025: Last year, users pointed out differences between the 5-year averages reported in this app and what USDA estimates in its weekly report. The difference exists because WPI calculates average based on the last 5 years of observations for the current week. In cases where ob...
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.