The cattle herd looks to be in for some more contraction. February cow slaughter was up 12.2 percent over last year – though February 2022 was down 9.5 percent from 2020 and 12.4 percent from 2019, but those high slaughter numbers are a sign of more contraction. For the last week of February, cow slaughter was 21.1 percent of the overall kill compared to 20.3 percent last year. Typically, this is the time of year when dairy cow slaughter increases, but the beef cow numbers have been large too on top of a big run last fall. Aside from what it portends for the beef cattle herd moving forward, it is also a sign of the uncertain economic times now. Despite the increase in cow slaughter, cull cow prices have been bullish, unl...
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
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.