Last week, WPI noted in a summer cattle market outlook that 14 percent of the cattle producing regions were in drought, compared to 38 percent last year, with the exception of the southeast cow/calf country where drought is worsening and raises questions about cow culling, heifer retention, and hay and forage crops in the region. The latest crop progress report shows that more than 91 percent of the corn crop in North Carolina is rated fair, or worse. Very poor ratings cover 44 percent of the crop, and 29 percent is rated as poor. That may mean a lot of corn in the state could be chopped for silage for forage, but not much can be transported to bigger cow calf areas of Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and elsewhere. And with 67 per...
Weather concerns and the impacts of the war in Iran helped push wheat and corn to sharp gains Tuesday, with both markets blowing past key technical resistance levels. The weather is now coupled with geopolitical tensions that look increasingly hard to resolve, which is giving funds the perfect...
Congress is moving forward with its FY 2027 spending bills, while also still working to address FY 2026 funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is still in a shutdown. The House Agriculture-FDA Appropriations Subcommittee marked up and passed its FY 2027 bill. The House bill prov...
Update for 6 April 2025: Last year, users pointed out differences between the 5-year averages reported in this app and what USDA estimates in its weekly report. The difference exists because WPI calculates average based on the last 5 years of observations for the current week. In cases where ob...
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.