Knuckleheads Aides to President Joe Biden charged U.S. meat packers with profiting off the pandemic and said they are going to “crack down on illegal price fixing.” The Administration had earlier said it would provide $500 million to expand meat packing capacity even though the constraint has been labor and not infrastructure. And if they have not been enforcing the law against price fixing, the question should be why not? Now the White House is adding $1.4 billion worth of COVID stimulus funds to help small meat packers and workers. The major meat packers responded by saying the White House is ignoring analysis already conducted by USDA that shows the problem was insufficient labor at packing plants causing a backup on...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Monday, 25 May is a U.S. holiday, and both the markets and our office will be closed. Please note that the next issue of Ag Perspectives will be published on Tuesday, 26 May. The WPI staff wishes everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
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.