A number of developing factors over the past several weeks suggest that the 2017/18 crop cycle will be different across the globe.Major common threads for world agricultural production, trade and crop prices during the last four crop cycles were growing production and building global stocks. Those of wheat, corn and soybeans all reached record levels during this period, aided and abetted by generally favorable worldwide weather conditions. U.S. production and stocks mirrored this trend and were an integral part of it. Another less discussed common thread was the rising demand, which also reached record levels despite the long uptrend of the U.S. dollar. Even so, demand did not grow enough to forestall significant multi-year stock building...
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...
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.