The message is that agricultural lenders are more than a little worried about the rapid and steep decline in prices as well as the resulting destruction to their clients' balance sheets and cash flow.The Big Iron Farm Show, one of the largest in the country, was held in Fargo this week. I participated in a panel discussion and spoke at an evening farm meeting that had more than 200 farmers in attendance. Two agricultural lenders from Farm Credit Services spoke just ahead of me. Their topic was "Financial Structure and Strategies for Lean Times." For me, it was deja vu all over again. I thought I was back in the 1980s.The message is that agricultural lenders are more than a little worried about the rapid and steep decline in prices and the r...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Key Market Insights Geopolitical Limbo: Geopolitical risk remained a key driver across global commodity markets today. President Trump stated that the Iran memorandum of understanding is not yet final and warned that military action could resume if negotiations fail. Both sides continue w...
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.