The corn and soybean harvests are going full blast in the United States. Those of us with long -- though not necessarily accurate -- memories can recall fall harvests commonly lasting through November and even into December, weather permitting. To have the corn harvest 54 percent complete and 41 percent of the soybeans already harvested by the end of September is simply amazing. But then, this is an amazing year, although not in a good sense. We cannot recall a year in which weather-related crop production problems affected so many important producing countries around the world as has been the case in 2012/13. The U.S, EU, Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, North Africa, the Middle East, Australia and potentially China have all suffered, or will...
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.