The big story in livestock industry margins continues to be the record-breaking weakness in beef packer profits, which fell another $50/head last week to -$193/head. The surge in cattle prices and declines in slaughter weights more than offset gains in beef values and left packers with the lowest per-head profits since WPI’s records began. Feedlot margins improved for both placements and closeout sales with the rally live cattle futures and physical fed cattle values supporting the profitability gains. Southern Plains closeout margins are near five-year seasonal record highs presently. Hog packer margins dipped slightly last week as processors were able to push hog prices lower while the pork cutout retreated from the prior week. Hog...
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.