After rising sharply in 2022, input costs remain stubbornly high yet today. At the same time, the prices received for major crops like corn, soybeans and wheat have fallen by as much as 30 percent over the same period. In response to these economic headwinds, Congress stepped up through the American Relief Act to provide financial relief through one-time economic assistance payments to farmers totaling $10 billion in addition to approximately $21 billion to help farmers recover from catastrophic natural disasters. Combined, more than $30 billion in ad hoc support is expected to be distributed to farmers and ranchers throughout 2025. Driven by this, and strong economic returns in the cattle sector where beef prices are up well ov...
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.