As WPI reported, last Friday’s Cattle on Feed report was a bearish surprise. Inventory on feed was 101 percent of last year and September placements were 106 percent of September 2022, even though the July cattle inventory showed feeder cattle outside of feedlots at the lowest since the bottom of the cattle cycle in 2014. Three factors played into the numbers. First, prices. The question is whether older cow/calf producers are taking advantage of once in a lifetime prices to exit production. Second, imports. Given the cattle herd situation, placements were unlikely to increase so dramatically without a boost of imported cattle. Year-to-date Mexican feeder cattle imports are up 50 percent over last year, and Canada had the...
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.