Typically, prices for hams and the beef rib primal drop after Christmas, but this year, reduced slaughter has been more supportive of prices. What does that portend for 2025? Cattle slaughter last week was down 29.7 percent compared to the week prior and down 13.3 percent from year-ago levels. This was the smallest slaughter volume of the year and helped boxed beef prices. Hog slaughter was down 20.5 percent from the week prior and down 7.7 percent from year-ago levels. Notably, cattle slaughter reflects the lower level of cow slaughter for ground beef, which has also supported the price of the chuck and round primals, a dynamic which is likely to continue into 2025 as demand for ground beef increases seasonally. Hams are heavily infl...
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.