The November WASDE was expected to be bullish, but USDA’s actual numbers surprised even the most ardent corn and soybean bulls. One of the biggest surprises was the larger-than-expected cut to 2020/21 U.S. corn ending stocks, based largely on a huge export increase. The soy complex certainly received bullish news as well with USDA cutting 2020/21 ending stocks to their lowest levels since 2013/14. Heading into the report, the industry thinking was that 2020/21 corn ending stocks would need to fall below 1.9 Bbu to be bullish, and soybean ending stocks would need to fall below 200 Mbu. UDSA met both of those objectives for creating a bullish market response. Moreover, cuts to both world and U.S. ending stocks for corn, soybeans,...
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.