After an approximate five-month delay, Congress has approved a $19 billion disaster bill that would cover in addition to other relief efforts, certain agricultural losses. The House passed the bill 354-58 yesterday (it failed the week before by one vote) and the Senate had passed it by a vote of 85-8 the previous week. The legislation provides $3.005 billion for crop and livestock losses due to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires and snowstorms during 2018 and 2019. Once funds are allocated for California, high Plains livestock, southern poultry and other crops, it is not clear how much will go to the corn sector (a great deal of which will be for corn in storage that was flooded). Note that corn was far cheaper at the ti...
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.