Livestock Live Hog Prices Weaken Further, Piglet Prices Surge Higher The national average live hog price continued to soften last week, shedding RMB .06/kg ($.004/lb.) or .4 percent. Even with feed prices continuing to fall, the operating loss per live hog worsened by RMB 6/head ($.88/head) or 2.9 percent. Interestingly, the lower cash price for corn actually resulted in the corn-hog ratio improving to 5.30. In contrast to the trend in live hog prices, piglet prices continue to remain strong. The latest survey from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) showed the national average piglet price fell to RMB 38.04/kg ($2.52/lb.) or RMB 570.60/head ($83.42/head) for a 15-kg piglet last week. While that is down from a peak at the...
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...
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.