Russian Grain Markets: 3–7 August 2026 The Russian grain market continued to decline during the first week of August following the closure of the Azov and Don ports and restrictions on Black Sea trade linked to the war in Ukraine. Regular air attacks on infrastructure and vessels have further disrupted logistics and export activity. The disruption has prompted exporters to pause purchases in both the Azov and Black Sea regions, causing internal trade to weaken sharply. Russia remains highly dependent on exports, particularly wheat. With ABCD companies not currently active in Russia and alternative trading activity limited, the market has few outlets for grain. Kazakhstan has also closed its borders to Russian wheat. The combination of...
What You Need to Know Today: Headlines emerging from negotiations between President Trump and President Xi were relatively limited, with a more substantive announcement expected Monday. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer indicated that additional details related to agricultural trade cou...
The heat of summer is now transitioning into more moderate temperatures, and the next two months have the busiest marketing periods of the year for replacement cattle. Weather always influences the replacement cattle market, and the primary grain belt in the Southern Plains, where many cattle a...
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.