Macroeconomics Price Surges, Missing Data, and the Market Outlook While monthly food prices have only recently seen an increase from where they were a year ago, the data should come with a huge caveat. The driver of the surge from the second half of 2019 through the second half of 2020 were live hog and pork prices. With their collapse here in the first half of 2021, the aggregate average fell into negative territory before a modest uptick in May. The fact that pork prices account for about 40 to 50 percent of the calculated basket has hidden the runup in other prices. Moreover, with hog producers having such high operating margins for that same period, the rapidly rising feed prices were often absorbed. The impact of winter diseases, fr...
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
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.