Beans and Gas The EU agreed to buy more soybeans and liquified natural gas (LNG) from the U.S. Nothing reflects the EU better playing Trump for a fool than this part of the agreement. Juncker doesn’t buy soybeans, and EU businesses will only buy these products if they are competitively priced. American LNG won’t be competitive once Germany’s Nord Stream II pipeline is completed to Russia, and South American soybeans will once again dominate the EU market after China lifts its punitive tariffs on U.S. supplies. TTIP Redux A bilateral trade agreement was tried before in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations and failed. When asked for the reason for that failure, a former Obama administrati...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Monday, 25 May is a U.S. holiday, and both the markets and our office will be closed. Please note that the next issue of Ag Perspectives will be published on Tuesday, 26 May. The WPI staff wishes everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
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.