War Disruption Focusing first on the Bear in the Ukrainian living room, palm and soyoil prices have hit record levels on concern that sunflower seed may lose availability. With Ukraine’s Black Sea port facilities shut down and one grain ship hit by a missile, there could be increased pressure to move commodities westward, to and through the EU. Grains are most impacted but with those hitting their daily futures trading limit, cash flushed into soybeans instead. Soybean values are at a nine-year high. History suggests this is a short-term market disruption, but a full return to business as usual will depend on actions by Western governments. Market Overview Weather is still the key determinant of price. Some analysts dangled t...
Russian Grain Markets: 29 June-3 July 2026 The new marketing season has officially begun in Russia, although bearish sentiment has been concentrated in the southern regions closest to the Black Sea ports, where export demand has been weakest. Delays in grain deliveries to inland elevators have...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
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.