While the price of Brent crude is up 12 percent since Friday, fertilizer has increased 33 percent. Fertilizer values are priced to energy but now seem to be outpacing it. Crop nutrients have been hit by a trifecta of higher energy input costs, soaring demand and low supplies. Agricultural commodity futures were limit up again today and Canada’s Nutrien sees a prolonged disruption due to the war. Together, Russia and Belarus produce nearly 33 percent of global potash, Russia is the world’s top exporter of nitrogen, and it exports 12.7 percent of all phosphates. Moscow could short the market further if it so chooses. Because fertilizer represents 15 percent of production costs, U.S. fertilizer use per acre has declined as farmers...
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.
Russian Grain Markets: 29 June-3 July 2026 The new marketing season has officially begun in Russia, although bearish sentiment has been concentrated in the southern regions closest to the Black Sea ports, where export demand has been weakest. Delays in grain deliveries to inland elevators have...
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...