How the economy and consumers react to the coronavirus will be important to the food and agriculture sector. A large economic decline like the Great Recession beginning in September 2008 caused the stock market to continue losing money until March of 2009. That means that any single day’s increase in the stock market is not indicative of a bottom. Wall Street Journal writers Greg Ip, Danny Dougherty and Anthony DeBarros point out that there is no historical precedent for the current intentional self-shutdown of an economy. They note that the closest is the 2003 SARS epidemic in Hong Kong. The Special Administrative Region shut down in a fashion similar to what is happening now with the coronavirus. Schools, restaurants, shops a...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.