Hog prices were down more than 35 percent from a year ago and industry analyst Steve Meyer of Kerns & Associates says the sector is incurring the greatest economic damage he has seen in 30 years. He says, “the backup could reach as many as 2.5 million hogs by the end of the year…[and] potential 2020 revenues from hog sales have been reduced by roughly $4.7 billion.” Things are not much better on the beef side with live cattle down 14.5 percent and cattle slaughter still down from a year ago. The livestock sector is likely to see adverse impacts into 2021 but it is still curious why USDA’s announced changes in the Livestock Gross Margin (LGM) insurance program will not take place until next year. The helpful chan...
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.