China is emphasizing larger, better capitalized hog production facilities that can deploy better disease management practices. Chinese farmers are taking pigs to larger size before slaughter to capture a better return in the current high-priced market. However, there are potentially permanent changes in what the Chinese eat as a side effect of the disease problem. The Chinese constitute roughly 19 percent of the world’s population and consume nearly 30 percent of the world’s beef, chicken and pork. However, that is largely due to the country’s out-sized consumption of pork. Pork disappearance in China reached its peak in 2014 and its share of global pork consumption had begun to decline before the outbreak of ASF. ...
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...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.