Grain and soy markets are dividing their focus between this week’s trade negotiations in Beijing and USDA’s reports on initial planting intentions and quarterly stocks that will be released 29 March. These are two different subjects of course, but the outcome of the U.S.-China trade negotiations can have a major impact on future quarterly stocks totals. Without seeing USDA’s estimates of planting intentions, the trade is already discounting them. In its early projections, USDA used a corn acreage number of 92 million acres, up from 89.1 million in 2018/19, and it projected soybean acreage at 85 million acres, 4.2 million less than in 2018/19. The general expectation is that USDA’s initial planting intentions report...
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.