Grain and soy complex futures were weaker overnight as profit taking in corn and wheat pushed those markets lower. Soybeans were sold in sympathy with the grains, although soyoil posted modest gains on long soyoil/short soymeal spread trade. Agricultural and equity markets received a boost this morning from a morning tweet from President Trump that indicated U.S.-Chinese trade relations had taken a turn for the better. The tweet noted that he and Chinese President Xi Jingping had “a very good telephone conversation” and would meet at the G20 summit in Japan later this month. U.S. equities were encouraged by the news, and the Dow quickly moved 300 points higher. This sparked some short covering in soybeans, and corn futures boun...
Energy: Risk Over Rules Fighting between the United States and Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz escalated overnight. Tehran accused U.S. forces of striking a residential area after U.S. Central Command said its second round of attacks in three days targeted Iranian radar systems and mi...
Key Takeaways: Ghana’s new law classifies all cocoa plantations as “protected farms,” which carries significant implications for farmers. Chief among these implications is the inability to switch area under cocoa to other crops, even when economic or biological conditio...
Key Takeaways: Paraguay typically ranks among the world’s largest soybean exporters, with roughly two-thirds of its production destined for export markets, although most shipments remain within South America. As a landlocked country, Paraguay relies heavily on the Paraguay-Paraná...
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.