Classical Swine Fever in Japan/ASF in China Cases of classical swine fever (CSF), also known as hog cholrea, have been detected in five prefectures in Japan, most recently in the centrally-located Aichi Prefecture. So far, about 15,000 pigs are in the process of being culled. (Correction: It was initially reported here that this outbreak in Japan was African swine fever (ASF); it is, in fact, classical swine fever, which is a different strain caused by other viruses. Both, however, are highly contagious and lead to pig mortality. The critical difference from a contagion and market impact is that, according to the Organization of International Epizootics, there is no approved vaccine for ASF. There is an approved vaccine for CSF, but outbr...
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.