World Perspectives
livestock

More Upside than Downside

Cow/calf operations in the southern Plains and across the U.S. are facing sharply negative production margins. WPI’s latest research suggests the average operation will lose $100/cow unit this year as rising feed costs are juxtaposed against stagnant or falling revenues. After spiking precipitously during 2014 and 2015 as the market faced tight cattle supplies, feeder cattle prices have fallen 50 percent from their highs. More recently, the spring 2019 bear trend in feeder cattle and live cattle futures has pressured cash feeder cattle prices even lower. Consequently, WPI’s revenue forecasts for the sale of calves and feeder cattle (the summation of present fall futures prices and the expected cash basis) are down 7 percent ver...

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feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Summary of Futures

Mar 26 Corn closed at $4.3125/bushel, up $0.0375 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Wheat closed at $5.525/bushel, up $0.1525 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Soybeans closed at $11.3725/bushel, up $0.1325 from yesterday's close.  Mar 26 Soymeal closed at $307.9/short ton, up $4.9 fr...

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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.

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