It was an interesting week in the markets and it appears the coming weeks and months will also prove to be much more interesting than the last several years. World demand for agricultural commodities has risen every year, through record-high prices and low prices. Five years of almost flawless world crop production has masked this annual expansion of consumption. WPI has pointed this out often. We’ve also pointed out a major crop production disaster wasn’t needed to start to turn the market tide. World ending supplies of corn and wheat have been slowly tightening. When you take China out of the corn and wheat equations, ending supplies are every bit as tight (maybe tighter) than they were when prices were scoring record highs...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.