Corn Farmers took advantage of good weather conditions and corn with nearly ideal moisture levels and pushed the harvest an additional 7 percent last week. Yields remain strong at 7 MT/ha and the Buenos Aires Grain Exchange pegged the crop at 49 MMT, unchanged from its prior estimate. Private firms indicate the crop could be slightly larger and in the range of 49.5-50 MMT. Producers are now solely focused on selling corn, as the wheat is bagged and only a little remaining. Soybeans are being held in storage as a hedge against inflation (or, as farmers put it, “saving in dollars”). With corn the only thing left to market, farmers are becoming aggressive, especially as FAS prices ($225-230) are historically good, even if t...
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...
In agriculture and food processing, we think a lot about infrastructure: transportation and storage, processing and packaging, distribution and delivery. It is a physical system of roads, railroads, and rivers; concrete and steel storage; processing plants, warehouses, and machinery; and, event...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.