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: Crude oil prices dropped sharply with traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. There were reports that Iran was behind an attack on a cargo ship near the coast of Oman, which would be a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. Pr...
On Wednesday, the White House submitted a national security supplemental spending request for $87.6 billion. The majority of the request includes funding for the conflict in the Middle East, but there are agricultural provisions as well. The supplemental funding package includes more than $11 b...
Can we really expect a bushel of corn to carry an environmental passport throughout the entire food system? One that reliably documents its carbon footprint, biodiversity impacts, water use, soil carbon, and other environmental attributes all the way from the farm field to the consumer? This is...
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.