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...
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.