Sunday is the Easter holiday; traditionally it is a high point for lamb consumption and production increases leading into the holiday. But the last two weeks (i.e., the first two weeks of April) lamb slaughter was down about 12 percent from 2021 – when Easter fell on 4 April, two weeks earlier than this year. In other words, lamb slaughter was higher after Easter 2021 than it is pre-Easter 2022. Moreover, total production so far this year is down about 13.6 percent, or 5 million pounds though last Friday. However, despite declining production, consumption is rising. This is a trend; in 2021 lamb and beef were the only two proteins to see a per capita increase – and for lamb it was the second year in a row (albeit from a very sm...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.