Heat waves are on everyone’s mind, and while we lack the expertise to accurately predict the impact of climate change on agricultural production, history offers some interesting observations. The Medieval Warm Period between 750 and 1350 AD involved an unusual temperature rise that melted glaciers and led to a revolution in European agriculture. There was also less moisture. Crop yields tripled and the farms of Northern Europe outperformed their Mediterranean counterparts. Three-field crop rotation along with other agricultural technologies developed. Winter grains previously turned into whisky or beer were replaced with grapes and increased wine making. However, warming in the modern era has a different market situation. Globa...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
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.