China Purchasing Commitments One of the Trump administration’s goals in negotiating a trade deal with China is to get Beijing’s commitment to buy more American farm products, especially soybeans as well as perhaps some sorghum and DDGS. China can only import what it needs, though, and demand for animal feed ingredients like these has fallen. The scale of the hog losses there due to African swine fever (ASF) may be indicated by a reported 20 percent decline in pig feed sales in February. China has scaled back its purchasing of pork off the domestic market as a price support tool by 90 percent due to already higher pork values. Despite reduced purchasing by consumers, the price of hogs has hit a 14-month high. WTO Levera...
What You Need to Know Today: After a period of limited activity, USDA reported a sizeable 613 KMT in soybean export sales, including 330 KMT to China and 283 KMT to unknown destinations, potentially also China. The purchases represent a meaningful pickup in demand and bring China closer to ful...
Key Takeaways: Consumer spending is a key driver of the U.S. economy, and the latest retail sales data indicate that spending remains robust despite inflation. In September, total retail and food service sales rose more than 6 percent year-over-year, with food service spending up 7 percent and...
The Trump import plan for 300,000 MT of beef supplies used for ground beef, i.e., lean trim, from September through November has, according to Secretary Brooke Rollins, brought some relief to beef prices. The Executive Order states that the Secretary of Agriculture will analyze and review the m...
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.