The market is facing many knowns and unknowns. How President Trump’s tariff war will proceed is top among the unknowns, though it cannot be good until it is over. Now the President is threatening 200 percent tariffs on EU wines and liquor if Brussels does not drop its retaliatory duty on whisky. This is going to heat up fast. And it isn’t just U.S. agriculture feeling the impact. Europe’s FEFAC fears that the EU’s retaliatory tariffs on American grain and oilseeds will increase feed costs. Becoming clearer is the scale of South America’s production. The Rosario Grains Exchange adjusted its estimates for Argentine corn and soybeans lower, but Conab increased its outlook for Brazil’s production. Back...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: Corn, wheat, and the soy complex all formed new contract or at least rally highs to close what has become one of the most uniformly bullish weeks in CBOT history. Escalations in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine and attacks on civilian merchant vessels show n...
The Federal Reserve Board holds an annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, each year about this time, and this year’s meeting is now. It’s always a “must-watch” event, but this year, amidst persistent inflation and with a new Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh, it drew additiona...
You cannot escape the vortex of opinions about water scarcity in the Western United States, especially in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin. Agriculture is the villain in many of these editorials. Agriculture uses too much water, so it should use less, is the refrain. We all wish it was...