The global abundance of agricultural crops during the past four years is unprecedented and ultimately unsustainable. Change is inevitable, and it now clearly seems to be coming with the 2017/18 crop cycle.The safest truism in the world of agricultural commodities is that nothing ever stays the same. It may have seemed that this was challenged by the last four years (2013/14-2916/17) as generally favorable global weather and other factors, including the strong U.S. dollar, pushed world production of grains and soybeans to record levels. While world demand for those commodities also expanded enough to set new records during the same period, it was not enough to prevent world stocks of grain and soybeans from growing to levels never seen befor...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
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.