USDA released the U.S. Canada Hog Inventory Report yesterday. The U.S. data is based on the quarterly Hogs and Pigs Report which is as of the second quarter ending on 1 June and the data for Canada is a semi-annual report as of 1 July. This is always an insightful benchmark because of the integration of the two countries’ industries, though Canada’s swine herd is typically about 19 percent of the U.S. swine herd. As of mid-year, the inventory of all hogs and pigs in the U.S. and Canada was 88.4 million head, which was 101 percent of 2023 and 102 percent of 2022, its recent low point. The volatility of the hogs and pigs inventory in the past several years reflects the discovery of ASF in China and the disrupti...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
Key Takeaways: The Middle East and North Africa's arid climate and limited water resources have created a structural dependence on imported wheat. Government wheat tenders in major importing countries serve as important benchmarks for global trade, providing insight into exporter competitivene...
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.