It has been another week of solid gains in the oilseeds world. More analysts are tantalizing farmers with the prospect of record soybean prices. Beans in the teens could hit a record, maybe. The historical high was $17.94¾ in 2012, which in real terms would require $21.98 bushel today. The March contract high is still 25 percent below that remarkable number. Still, the influences pushing it higher remain the same, a sub-par crop in South America, and rumblings of war in the Black Sea region. Let’s start with the latter. War in Beans Autocrats with nuclear weapons are challenging enough but Vladimir Putin adds the war gaming strategy of presenting complete irrationality. Will he, or won’t he? The most bullish commodity s...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.