WPI’s initial acreage forecasts for the 2026 U.S. crop year show producers executing a mild expansion of soybean acres at the expense of corn while simultaneously reducing wheat area. Producers are also expected to keep minor crop acreage essentially unchanged, which will lead to a 0.4-percent reduction in the U.S. total crop acreage outlook. WPI’s forecasts come as many in the industry are turning their attention toward the 2026 crop outlook while the winter crop planting effort is ongoing. While there is still a long time to go until the spring crop acreage is decided, the fall market conditions can be very influential on the overall acreage mix. Certainly, for many states there is a tradeoff between expanding winter cro...
What You Need to Know Today: The Brazilian real surged to start the week after a surprise election result in which right-wing Flavio Bolsonaro won the first round of the election. The swing in the U.S. dollar/Brazilian real (USD/BRL) exchange rate caused soybeans to jump sharply higher in earl...
Key Takeaways: Harvest pressure is fundamentally a timing issue: supply arrives much faster than demand can adjust, creating temporary weakness that can occur across crops and regions. The intensity of that pressure depends less on crop size alone than on how quickly grain moves into the syste...
Pork packer margins closed out September as positive, marking an improvement in a challenging 2026. According to Sterling Marketing, for the week ending 26 September, pork packer margins were $6.98 per head, which is up from a loss of $0.13 the previous week, more than double the margin of $3.9...
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.