With October and the fall calf run now officially here, the beef industry is getting its first look at the realized profitability of many cow-calf operations. Most operations wean and market calves in the fall, starting in September or early October and running through December, which means Q4 prices and basis levels are hugely influential on industry profits. Early results, as should be no surprise, show the industry is in amazing financial shape with record-breaking profits realized so far. 2025 Outlook The October rally in feeder cattle futures, which put values at new all-time highs, has certainly helped cow-calf producer profitability. Kansas feeder steers are selling near $405/cwt for 700-800-lb animals, which equates to a posit...
With no bullish surprise out of Beijing this week and good weather taking over many global crop areas, funds spent the past couple of days selling off the peak positions they had built. CNN’s Live Updates blared, “No signs Trump and Xi resolved any thorny challenges.” By...
The long-awaited meeting between President Trump and President Xi of China has concluded, and details are elusive, though Trump stated today that he and Xi made some “fantastic” trade deals. Both countries reported the meetings as a success, but that has more to do with positioning...
We at WPI hear frequently that U.S. agriculture is broken and needs fixing. This argument is often heard in MAHA-related discussions and focuses on highly processed food consumption or the overuse of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Among farmers and food processors, however, especially tho...
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.