CBOT markets firmed heading into the April WASDE and continued their strength thereafter, despite a relatively benign USDA report. USDA stuck to its measured approach in estimating losses to South American soybean production as well as the Russia-Ukraine war. USDA’s policy is always to avoid forecasting policy changes and their impacts in the WASDE, and that approach has been extended to war impacts as well. The effect of this approach is that the agency’s Black Sea balance sheets are adjusting more slowly to the war’s impacts than are private estimates. For the U.S., the April WASDE brought little changes to the major crop balance sheets, with 2021/22 corn ending stocks unchanged after offsetting adjustments to eth...
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.