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: 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.