Antitrust investigators are looking at the past several weeks’ worth of developments in the beef and pork packing business. Although there is overlap in the ownership of these two industries, it is not 100 percent. However, what each experienced was a normal supply of animals for slaughter, a loss of capacity to fabricate as workforces were impacted by COVID, at the same time there was a surge in consumer demand for stockpiling in a shortage situation. Cutout values are now in decline and the trade is monitoring as the supply/demand functions slowly return to normal. What is notable is that exports are going contrary to the normal direction. Both beef and pork exports started the year at above average rates but have been droppi...
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.