It would not be fair or accurate to call wheat a minor U.S. crop, but it seems headed in that direction due to wheat prices that have been low enough to defy profitability in recent years as well as another factor.The array of reports from USDA on 12 January included its initial estimate of the seeded U.S. winter wheat area. This acreage was universally expected to be down substantially due to the chronically low wheat prices that prevailed last fall when winter wheat planting occurred. However, analysts were still surprised by the size of the decline estimated by USDA/NASS. Winter wheat acreage for the 2017/18 wheat crop year was put at 32.4 million acres, down from 36.9 million acres the previous crop year and more than 7 million acres le...
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.