Public Health Rising COVID-19 Related Death Toll Dampens New Year’s Outlook Although official figures appear to understate the reality of COVID on the ground in a big way, media coverage and social media posts tell another story. Per Bloomberg news, as well as the day-to-day experiences of this column’s co-author, funeral homes in major cities have been overwhelmed since mid-December. Families have been given roughly 5 to 10 minutes to mourn their deceased loved ones, while some people are reportedly selling their places in line as queues at some facilities have become quite lengthy. Meanwhile, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, through the end of December the trailing seven-day average for ne...
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.
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
WPI recently completed an expansion of our methodology for estimating and forecasting U.S. and global soybean crushing margins. The new approach incorporates the energy market’s expanding influence on the oilseed sector and the structural changes in global biofuel demand. This report is i...