Cultural The Year of the Pig is Here This week was the kickoff of China’s largest and longest national holiday of the year, the Spring Festival (also known as Chinese New Year). The tradition dates back more than 4,000 years and coincides with the start of the Lunar Calendar. Monday was New Year’s Eve with celebrations featuring images of pigs, the zodiac animal for 2019, taking place across the country. The Spring Festival will run until 15 February and then be succeeded by the Lantern Festival. As such, soybean and corn processing activities should slow to a crawl for at least the next ten days. The pig follows the dog as the twelfth and last zodiac animal in China’s Lunar Calendar system. The use of the zodiac starte...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.