World Perspectives
livestock

Livestock Industry Margins

The livestock packing sector saw mixed trends in profitability over the past week with packer margins improving for both the beef and pork sectors. Beef packing margins have been negative for five weeks now and hog packing margins in the red for three weeks, both of which present a threat to prices for cattle and hogs. Forward-looking placement margins for feedlots and wean-to-finish producers turned higher on stronger expected/hedged sale prices and, in the case of feedlots, lower feeder cattle costs. Note that farrow-to-finish margins at farrowing hit a new four-year high at $39/head last week. In contrast, closeout margins (e.g., profits on last week’s sales) deteriorates for the feedlot industry and farrow-to-finish and wean-to-finish h...

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Happy New Year!

The WPI team extends our best wishes to you and your families for a healthy and happy New Year. Thank you for your faithful readership, we are looking forward to serving you in 2026!  Please note that our next report will be issued on Friday, 2 January as the U.S. markets are closed for th...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Market Commentary: January WASDE is the Future

The pre-holiday risk-off, profit-taking mode continued on the last trading day of 2025. Traders closed out the calendar year with the expected low-level enthusiasm. Positions were tidied up with few fresh inputs as the past is the past and the future is now the USDA January WASDE report. ...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Summary of Futures

Mar 26 Corn closed at $4.4025/bushel, down $0.0025 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Wheat closed at $5.07/bushel, down $0.0375 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Soybeans closed at $10.475/bushel, down $0.1475 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Soymeal closed at $299.4/short ton, down $...

Happy New Year!

The WPI team extends our best wishes to you and your families for a healthy and happy New Year. Thank you for your faithful readership, we are looking forward to serving you in 2026!  Please note that our next report will be issued on Friday, 2 January as the U.S. markets are closed for th...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Market Commentary: January WASDE is the Future

The pre-holiday risk-off, profit-taking mode continued on the last trading day of 2025. Traders closed out the calendar year with the expected low-level enthusiasm. Positions were tidied up with few fresh inputs as the past is the past and the future is now the USDA January WASDE report. ...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Summary of Futures

Mar 26 Corn closed at $4.4025/bushel, down $0.0025 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Wheat closed at $5.07/bushel, down $0.0375 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Soybeans closed at $10.475/bushel, down $0.1475 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Soymeal closed at $299.4/short ton, down $...

livestock

Beef and Pork Past, Present and Future

USDA’s November slaughter data helps decode some of the outlook for 2026. There are the known knowns - cattle and hog numbers are down, weights are up, and the breeding inventory for cattle is growing while for hogs it remains constant. But stabilized dairy cow slaughter, lower sow slaugh...

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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.

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