The CBOT markets were surprisingly insulated from a jump in crude oil that started the week. Crude oil futures rallied to $115/brl - their highest levels since the earliest days of the U.S.-Iran war - on rhetoric from the White House that signaled an escalation in the conflict. While the oil headlines would have been massively supportive for CBOT ag trade just a few weeks ago, traders seem to have moved on from these knee-jerk reactions. Now, traders in the ag space are more focused on the planting and acreage outlook for 2026, neither of which are terribly bullish for U.S. interests. Additionally, there seems to have been a realization that the long-run correlations between crude oil and corn or other ags are relatively weak and that fuel...
What You Need to Know Today: The U.S. and Iran exchanged strikes, with the U.S. hitting Iranian bridges, energy sites, and military infrastructure. Iran launched a missile into Kuwait that damaged a desalination plant. Crude oil futures surged on heightened Middle East tensions, providing supp...
Key Takeaways: The EU heatwaves have coincided with key maize crop reproductive timing and featured high nighttime temperatures, a cruel two-sided blow to maize yields. France, much of western Europe, and Hungary have suffered the worst of the heat, with yield potential collapsing. WPI&r...
Congress returned this week from its Fourth of July recess, with another break scheduled for the month of August, to face a busy agenda before adjourning for the August recess. Congress has several priorities, including the National Defense Authorization Act, a potential third reconciliation pa...
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.