Tomorrow’s Hogs and Pigs report from USDA will be highly interesting as it will reflect six months of post-COVID-19 impacts on the U.S. hog and pork industry. The trade is expecting a 1 percent reduction in the total U.S. hog herd and a 2 percent reduction in the breeding herd. These expectations are based on poor production margins and producers’ stated intentions to reduce farrowings this fall. WPI, however, expects an increase in U.S. hog inventories and a bearish report from USDA. Our forecast is based on the apparent backlog in market hog slaughter and better-than-expected producer profits this fall. Our models suggest the economic incentives have been for producers to expand production rather than liquidate and that...
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.