Some are raising concerns that cooler temperatures and excess late season rain have caused quality problems for the typically high protein/strong gluten spring wheat crop. There is the threat that the lower quality wheat will end up being delivered against futures contracts and is causing falling prices in Minneapolis. That concern has not been reflected thus far in USDA’s weekly Crop Progress report. The share of the hard red spring wheat crop rated Good/Excellent fell from 74 percent at the beginning of August to 72 percent last week. That is still well above the average of the past ten years, and strikingly better than the 2021 and 2023 HRS crops at this time of the season. Thus far in August, the December HRS contract has f...
What You Need to Know Today: The September Cattle on Feed report was strongly bullish, with both the 1 September on-feed inventory and August placements coming in well below average expectations and below the bottom of their respective pre-report estimate ranges. China continues to buy U...
USDA’s September cattle on feed report was released Friday, with the total number of cattle in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounting to 11.2 million head, 101 percent of last year. Placements dropped in August to their lowest total for the month since records began in 1996...
Key Takeaways: The U.S. herd is stabilizing, but growth remains modest. Total goat inventory rose 1 percent in 2026, while meat-goat numbers increased 2 percent, which is not enough to materially reduce import dependence. Domestic slaughter is rising from a low base. Commercial slaughter incre...
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.