Food Better Than Healthcare While the healthcare sector has been called a miracle for the way it has handled the pandemic, the food industry has been criticized and USDA has announced billions in grants to make it more “resilient.” Yet food remained completely available whereas hospital beds and vaccines ran into short supply. Moreover, vaccinations and death rates from the disease do not correlate well. The number of deaths per 100,000 and the share of the population with a single dose of vaccine has an R2 of 0.04; using a fully dosed metric is even worse, finding a correlation of just 0.01 correlation. Italy with 73 percent fully vaccinated suffered 2.6 deaths per 100,000 whereas Ukraine with just 28 percent fully vaccinated...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Monday, 25 May is a U.S. holiday, and both the markets and our office will be closed. Please note that the next issue of Ag Perspectives will be published on Tuesday, 26 May. The WPI staff wishes everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
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.