The U.S. government shut down avocado imports from Mexico’s Michoacán state after a federal inspector received presumably a threatening phone message. Rather than accept the plausibility of wrongdoing in one of the most corrupt, drug cartel running parts of his country, Michoacán Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador dismissed the concern, arguing that there are probably political and economic reasons for the U.S. suspension. This is similar thinking to Russian President Vladimir Putin insisting that imported U.S. chicken legs come from separate and inferior plants than the ones delivering chicken breasts to Americans, as if using two separate plants to break the same $2 bird makes economic sense...
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.