The 31 March USDA planting intentions reports indicated notable changes ahead for U.S. barley acreage, and there are several reasons why.Barley acres in the U.S. have followed the pattern of wheat over the last few decades with planted area now forecast to drop 17 percent from 2016. 70 percent of the U.S. barley acreage is historically in North Dakota, Montana and Idaho. The 31 March USDA planting intentions reports showed that North Dakota’s barley acreage will drop 36 percent from last year with Montana’s down 30 percent. Meanwhile, Idaho’s farmers indicated they will increase barley acres by 5 percent. This year’s U.S. acreage won’t be the smallest ever, but it will be close (see chart below).The biggest reasons for the steep declines in...
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.