Last year, cattle markets were driven by tight supplies of cattle, heavy carcass weights, low cow culling rates, higher input costs, more imports of feeder cattle, and the detection of New World Screwworm in Mexico in November. All were factors in record prices. The focus now turns to 2025, and how those factors will carry over.As WPI reported last week, entering 2025, meat demand (price times volume) remains strong. For hogs and pork, based on the latest Hogs and Pigs report (see WPI’s coverage here), the lower supply of heavy weight market hogs indicates slaughter in early 2025 will be lower, but the larger inventory of lighter weight market hogs indicates increased slaughter starting in Q2 2025. On the cattle and beef side, tight supplie...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
Key Takeaways: The Middle East and North Africa's arid climate and limited water resources have created a structural dependence on imported wheat. Government wheat tenders in major importing countries serve as important benchmarks for global trade, providing insight into exporter competitivene...
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.