U.S. wheat futures markets have been buffeted by a number of sometimes conflicting fundamental trends in the last nine months. Very low wheat prices in 2016 caused growers to plant the smallest winter wheat acreage for the 2017/18 crop in 100 years. Last year’s drought in the northern Plains drove hard red spring (HRS) wheat futures prices sharply higher, although a good part of the gain was later returned when that crop’s production turned out better than feared. There was USDA’s final 2017/18 U.S. all wheat production of 1.741 billion bushels that was down about 570 million bushels or 25 percent from 2016/17, but the world produced a record crop for the third year in a row. Other than for a brief period around the end of...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.