Russian Grain Markets: 12–16 January, 2026 The Russian grains market is slowly but steadily emerging from the extended holiday period. Extreme cold weather is complicating operations, but grain and oilseed receiving and loadings are continuing—albeit with delays—at Russia’s Black Sea ports. Operations at the occupied Azov Sea ports have been temporarily suspended due to ice conditions. The Ukrainian port of Mariupol (now occupied) is currently frozen, and Russia’s Azov Sea port of Taganrog may also freeze. This is not expected to become a major issue, as Russia has two icebreakers operating in the region. Ice conditions could persist in Azov Sea waters until March if cold weather continues. Russia’s ice-f...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices dropped sharply with traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. There were reports that Iran was behind an attack on a cargo ship near the coast of Oman, which would be a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. Pr...
On Wednesday, the White House submitted a national security supplemental spending request for $87.6 billion. The majority of the request includes funding for the conflict in the Middle East, but there are agricultural provisions as well. The supplemental funding package includes more than $11 b...
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.