After a run up in recent days over drought in the U.S., bad news from a major crop tour, plus drought in Europe and China, there was profit taking today as the domestic weather outlook improves and the Black Sea becomes more active. There was uncertainty at the open as corn, soyoil and HRS showed early strength, then waivered along with the rest of the grains and oilseed contracts, and then sold off on mostly higher volume. Only feeder cattle and lean hogs ended the day higher. The crazy part was USDA’s flawed rollout of a new Export Sales reporting platform. At first issuance there were extraordinary numbers listed. As one analyst said, “I'm just a little skeptical when the new crop soybean sales are four times ou...
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
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.