Background Here in WPI's hometown of Washington, D.C., the end of March is a busy time. There are cherry blossoms, warm sunshine and of course college basketball's March Madness. However, for the past few weeks WPI's analysts like grain wonks elsewhere have been intensely focused on what we believe is the biggest event of the month: USDA's 30 March Prospective Plantings report (PPR).As many of you know, the PPR is a survey of farmers across the U.S. Generally, the survey asks farmers what they intend to do this planting season, i.e. what crop(s) they plan on planting, total acreage, etc. Many analytical firms publicize their best "guesses" ahead of USDA's report, so rather than duplicate that exercise we decided to ask our analysts for a m...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.