Lean hog futures surged to new contract highs over the past several weeks, followed by a correction in values that remains ongoing. Despite strong pork demand and reduced slaughter volumes and carcass weights, traders have been wary of the seasonal trend for prices to pull back in Q3 and Q4. WPI’s latest analysis of pork and hog demand indicates these concerns are well founded, and our models project continued weakness in the pork sector. Notably, values will remain near or slightly below 2024 levels for the pork cutout and CME futures, while physical hog prices are expected to see modest year-over-year gains. For 2026, however, early projections suggest producers will again experience strong pricing and profitability in the first hal...
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...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
Key Takeaways: The Middle East and North Africa's arid climate and limited water resources have created a structural dependence on imported wheat. Government wheat tenders in major importing countries serve as important benchmarks for global trade, providing insight into exporter competitivene...
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.