THE OPEN Nov beans: 17 lower Dec meal: 2.80 lower Dec soyoil: 108 pts lower Dec corn: 11 lower Dec wheat: 10 lower The markets opened into lower prices due to weight from outside markets, which included sharply lower stocks, weaker energies, and a firmer US dollar. Traders will be monitoring Fed comments this week to get a handle around tapering. Corn prices remained steadier vs. soy, as 1. there is more chatter about disappointing corn yields as we move further into harvest and 2. the bean markets affiliation with Chinese equities, which has in the past resulted in bean market weakness. The possible failure of China's Evergrande Group, a property developer with over $300 bl...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices dropped sharply with traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. There were reports that Iran was behind an attack on a cargo ship near the coast of Oman, which would be a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. Pr...
On Wednesday, the White House submitted a national security supplemental spending request for $87.6 billion. The majority of the request includes funding for the conflict in the Middle East, but there are agricultural provisions as well. The supplemental funding package includes more than $11 b...
Can we really expect a bushel of corn to carry an environmental passport throughout the entire food system? One that reliably documents its carbon footprint, biodiversity impacts, water use, soil carbon, and other environmental attributes all the way from the farm field to the consumer? This is...
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.