Today's USDA corn numbers clearly caught the market by surprise with a decrease in production and a 1 December quarterly stocks number of more than 300 million bushels below the average trade guess. General Comments This was USDA reports day. Covered in a separate analysis, they were surprisingly bullish on corn, neutral on soybeans and bearish on wheat. That created very wide trading ranges in very large volume and generated big time buying in corn and soybeans as well as heavy selling in wheat.USDA also announced export sales this morning. Included were 216,000 MT of 2014/15 soybeans to China, 180,000 MT of old crop corn to unknown and 125,700 MT of wheat to Venezuela.U.S. equity markets were slightly lower today, while crude oil was hi...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Monday, 25 May is a U.S. holiday, and both the markets and our office will be closed. Please note that the next issue of Ag Perspectives will be published on Tuesday, 26 May. The WPI staff wishes everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
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.