Errata: The original version of this article incorrectly state the January 2018 soybean yield estimate at 50.6 BPA, instead of the true February (which made up for the delayed January report) estimate of 51.6 BPA. All statistics related to this yield estimate and charts/tables have been corrected below. USDA surprised the commodity markets on Friday with bullish adjustments to the U.S. corn and soybean balance sheets, particularly the unexpected reductions in yields for both commodities. The surprise created by the latest balance sheet makes it worthwhile to evaluate the USDA’s adjusted estimates relative to historical patterns. For this analysis, WPI uses the USDA’s yield, harvested acreage, and production forecasts as published in th...
What You Need to Know Today: It was a quiet trading day across major agricultural commodities, with most contracts closing within 1 percent of the previous day's settlement. Trading volumes for corn and the soy complex were lighter than earlier in the week, as traders were positioning before a...
New World Screwworm Another day, another case of New World Screwworm. USDA has reported nine cases of New World Screwworm (NWS) in the U.S. Of the nine reported cases, eight are located across four counties in Texas—Edwards, Gillespie, La Salle, and Zavala. Of the eight cases in Texas, si...
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the debates surrounding farm policy and crop production, especially the current back-and-forth about regenerative agriculture. Regeneration appears to be the word of the decade, the one that won’t go away. Its ubiquity cannot be ignored; in the same way we...
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.