U.S. hog producers saw a mixed year in 2024 with early-year prices bringing poor profitability while the dramatic hog rally since the summer has lifted financial fortunes significantly. A major component of those rising prices was the unexpected surge in pork demand, which pushed the cutout to new seasonal highs this fall. Now, producers, packers, and pork buyers are wondering what 2025 will bring and how demand and prices will fare in the post-election environment. WPI has just completed an update to our long-term (one-year forward) outlook for the hog and pork markets. The major findings from this effort are that producers are likely to see strong prices for the coming year, and if crop prices do not rise significantly, strong profit...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices dropped sharply with traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. There were reports that Iran was behind an attack on a cargo ship near the coast of Oman, which would be a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. Pr...
On Wednesday, the White House submitted a national security supplemental spending request for $87.6 billion. The majority of the request includes funding for the conflict in the Middle East, but there are agricultural provisions as well. The supplemental funding package includes more than $11 b...
Can we really expect a bushel of corn to carry an environmental passport throughout the entire food system? One that reliably documents its carbon footprint, biodiversity impacts, water use, soil carbon, and other environmental attributes all the way from the farm field to the consumer? This is...
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.