Livestock industry margins were decidedly mixed last week with diverging trends developing across the industry. Beef packer margins gained for the second straight week thanks to stronger beef prices that offset higher fed cattle prices, while feedlot margins dipped for both placements and closeouts Higher expected feed costs were the primary driver of the fourth straight week of declining feedlot placement margins with returns being negative for the third straight week. Closeout margins for feedlots fell from the prior week due to higher estimated feeder cattle purchase costs and greater cost of gain. For the hog and pork industry, packer margins weakened slightly last week as hog prices rose slightly and the drop value dipped, both o...
Weather remains the dominant driver of grain markets this time of year, but this week's trade has been a reminder that futures markets are constantly looking ahead. Corn and soybean prices don't simply react to today's weather — they respond to where traders believe production risks will...
As we wrote in last week’s Livestock Round Up, the Administration has announced the Strengthening Processing for U.S. Ranchers (SPUR) program that will provide up to $500 million in payments for small- and medium-sized processors to buy cattle. The Big 4 packers are ineligible, which has...
Key Takeaways: The European Parliament rejected a proposal to classify soyoil as a high ILUC-risk feedstock, preventing a potential phaseout from EU biofuel markets by 2030. Palm oil remains the only major vegetable oil designated as high ILUC-risk in the EU due to concerns over expansion into...
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.