Since the beginning of this month, a labor dispute among rail workers in Canada has been looming over the already tight fertilizer market. As of last week, Canadian Pacific Railway and the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC) could not come to an agreement to solve the disagreement and a lockout started this weekend. Canadian operations of CP are being scheduled for shutdown. As The Fertilizer Institute said, “this is the worst possible time” for a shutdown and could have a “devastating impact on fertilizer availability.” Last year, CP transported 151,789 carloads of potash. About 10 percent of CP’s cargo is fertilizer, about 75 percent of all fertilizer in Canada is moved by rail; the majority of potash co...
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.