Last week was fully of crazy news for the livestock and meat sector with much of it involving snowflakes, both real and of the college variety. Blizzard Snowflakes A late spring blizzard hit the Great Plains last week. The National Weather Service in Dodge City, Kansas reported the deepest accumulations reached 16-18 inches. The weight of the snow did cause severe damage to the hard winter wheat crop, but it is also having an impact on the cattle markets. The nearby Live Cattle futures contract is at an 18-month high this week. Much of the area battered by the blizzard was also subject to wildfires about a month ago, which damaged pasture areas. The snowstorm caused the loss of cattle, both on pasture and in feedlots. There are no officia...
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.