Hurricane Ida has finished barreling through the critical Louisiana grain export infrastructure and the question is what will be the impact? First, while Ida is a force of nature, the geographic area of the storm was much smaller than Katrina, meaning a smaller storm surge from Ida. Moreover, much of the damage from Katrina was due to failures in infrastructure (especially levees) that subsequently received investment. While Katrina was devastating to New Orleans, it was less damaging to U.S. agriculture and exports. From a risk standpoint, the southern coast and port area hit by Ida represents a quarter of the U.S. oil supply, over 40 percent of oil refining and over 60 percent of the export movement of grain from the Midwest. It is the l...
What You Need to Know Today: Markets got a surprise with a corn yield of 181.2 bushels/acre in the October WASDE, above the average estimate of 177.6 bushels/acre and up from USDA’s September estimate of 178.5 bushels/acre. Although stronger demand is expected to absorb some of the addit...
Key Takeaways: On Friday afternoon, President Trump announced that Russia will “immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel” to the United States. The deal, typical of this administration, is light on details but promises an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 m...
The USDA has lowered its 2026 red meat production forecasts slightly while forecasting a slight increase in broiler production. Beef is now projected at 24.802 billion pounds, 75 million pounds less than in September. Cow slaughter is expected to be up; however, this will be offset by lower ste...
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.