USDA released its annual Cattle Inventory report this week, which showed the cattle herd expanded enough in 2016 to impact beef production through 2018. Meanwhile, continued strong demand is supporting the pork sector. Cattle Expansion to Push Beef Production According to USDA’s Cattle Inventory report, all cattle and calves on feed for the slaughter market totaled 13.1 million head on 1 January. That is down 1 percent from the previous year and explains the increase in fat cattle prices,which have driven gross margins for packers down nearly 40 percent on the year.However, there are plenty of cattle coming through the pipeline. All cattle and calves in the U.S. as of 1 January totaled 93.6 million head, up 1.8 percent from the previous y...
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
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.