Yesterday's announcement of the sale of the Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBOT) to the CME Group is another reminder of just how much the grain business in the United States has changed since the mid-20th century. When we first became involved with it, there were grain exchanges of one sort or another located in most major origination or processing markets and/or locations where different modes of transportation met. As originally established, some of them tried to emulate Chicago and operate grain and oilseed futures markets as well as a cash grain trade. However, besides the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) the only grain futures markets that managed to survive were the hard red winter wheat contract at the KCBOT and the spring wheat contra...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.