The Washington Post featured an article about goat cheese production in the U.S. It notes that the number of dairy goats has increased nearly 132 percent since 1997. In 2020, dairy goats numbered 440,000, a 2 percent increase from 2019. It is not just goat cheese since U.S. production of specialty cheeses overall have been expanding. The increase in U.S. specialty cheese production preceded the Trump tariffs placed on EU cheeses but the import barrier likely helped. U.S. imports of cheese have declined over the past two years. However, the Biden Administration has now waived the extra duties as negotiators seek a solution to the long-running Boeing-Airbus dispute. Even if resolved, U.S. cheese is cheaper and may continue cutting into...
Key Takeaways: The CME Group is launching new 90 percent Lean Beef and 50 percent Lean Beef futures and options contracts in July. There are five key factors that must be present in physical markets and futures contract specifications for futures contracts to become successful. The two l...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
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.