Both Brazil and the U.S. have issued protests over a Thai legal ban against imported commodities and food with residues of the weed killer paraquat and the pesticide chlorpyrifos. The ban will prevent billions of dollars of trade in wheat, soybeans and some foods. The two countries have asked Thailand to instead follow Codex maximum residue levels. Thailand had also threatened to ban the use of glyphosate. Some other countries ban domestic use of paraquat and chlorpyrifos but not imports. One point of leverage is Thai rice exports. Rice is a heavier user of plant protection products than wheat or soybeans and it is the top agricultural export by Thailand. In fact, one of Bangkok’s goal is to become a larger exporter of rice. Me...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.