The NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournament starts this week; that is typically a major driver of demand for chicken wings – with the other drivers New Years and the NFL Super Bowl. According to the National Chicken Council, Americans ate 1.45 billion wings during the February Super Bowl; with two wings per bird, that is 725 million birds, or about 7.7 percent of the total 2022 broiler slaughter of 9.43 billion birds. Consider that is almost a whole month’s slaughter of birds to produce the wings that are, incredibly, consumed in one day. Anyway, the market is different going into the college basketball tournament this year. High demand in 2021, and COVID related bottlenecks, were bullish for wing prices. D...
What You Need to Know Today: The September Cattle on Feed report was strongly bullish, with both the 1 September on-feed inventory and August placements coming in well below average expectations and below the bottom of their respective pre-report estimate ranges. China continues to buy U...
USDA’s September cattle on feed report was released Friday, with the total number of cattle in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounting to 11.2 million head, 101 percent of last year. Placements dropped in August to their lowest total for the month since records began in 1996...
Key Takeaways: The U.S. herd is stabilizing, but growth remains modest. Total goat inventory rose 1 percent in 2026, while meat-goat numbers increased 2 percent, which is not enough to materially reduce import dependence. Domestic slaughter is rising from a low base. Commercial slaughter incre...
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.