China Differences A hog slaughter plant was rejected in the U.S. farm state of Nebraska for not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) reasons, but scale production is viewed totally differently in China. Three companies there have formed a “strategic cooperation deal” to produce 4 million Landrace pigs outside of Shanghai within four years and 10 million by 2025. Meanwhile, the internet debate was lively over the butchering of a hog in front of a class of kindergarteners in Hubei Province. Some reflected on its potential to scare the children, while others called it learning practical knowledge outside of their textbooks. Meanwhile, WPI analyst Mike Krueger quipped that students in the U.S. likely believe that pork chops come from trees. Sep...
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.