Macro Trends Food Inflation Reaches Highest Level in Seven and a Half Years The effects of the August 2018 outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) have continued to reverberate across China’s economy in 2019. In the second quarter of this year, food inflation has hit levels not seen since 2012. This spring’s run-up in the cost of food began when those prices climbed 4.1 percent in March versus March 2018, which occurred as live hog prices recovered following the Lunar New Year celebration in February. In April, food prices shot up 6.1 percent on an annualized basis, marking the largest monthly increase since April 2016. Then came an 18.2 percent surge in the cost of pork in May along with price increases of 26.7 percent for fres...
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.