USDA released its semi-annual cattle inventory report yesterday. It showed the U.S. herd on 1 January 2018 was the largest in nine years at 94.4 million head or 101 percent of the total on the same date a year ago. The calf crop was estimated at 35.8 million head or 102 percent of the 2016 total. The growth came from calves born during the first half of 2017, estimated at 26.0 million head or 73 percent of the annual total. The report confirms that the cattle herd is still increasing but at a slower pace. The more rapid expansion over the past three years followed a decline during the extended drought period that lowered pasture and range conditions through 2014. Thus, all eyes were on the documented female inventory changes as an indicato...
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.