USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. Total cattle on feed amounted to 11.4 million head, 99 percent of last year. Total placements were down 8 percent and below the average pre-report estimate. Those lighter placements were partially due to diminished supplies caused by a ban on live cattle imports from Mexico because of the New World screwworm. On a state-by-state basis, placements fell 85,000 head in Texas (83 percent of a year ago), 50,000 head in Colorado (71 percent), 15,000 head in Kansas (97 percent) and 10,000 head in “other states.” Nebraska placements were equal to May 2024. While several states continue to see inventory well below 2024 with Texas at 93 p...
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.