With tightening supplies of HRW and concerns about new crop quality, it is reasonable to ask what is going on in the KC HRW futures market.U.S. winter wheat prospects for 2017/18, murky though they may be, raise some interesting issues and questions. Historically, hard red winter wheat (HRW) has been by far the largest class of wheat produced in the U.S. Its seeds were originally brought to the U.S. in the mid-1800s by Mennonite immigrants from Germany and Russia. This wheat was found quite suitable for the Great Plains region since it could do well with limited amounts of rainfall. Its use quickly spread as crop farms began to replace open-range cattle grazing in the Plains during the second half of the 19th century. HRW is a versatile cla...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.
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...