The surprise in the March WASDE was USDA’s aggressive increase in estimated demand for U.S. corn during the second half of the 2017/18 crop year, raising that for exports by an eye-catching 175 million bushels to 2.225 billion bushels. It also boosted its estimate of corn used for ethanol by 50 million bushels to 5.575 billion bushels. These changes increased the total estimated demand for U.S. corn in 2017/18 to a record 14.820 billion bushels. It was the nearly 9 percent jump in estimated corn exports that captured the most attention, which could likely be the biggest such increase ever in a March WASDE. The new number drew immediate skepticism from many observers who have seen U.S. corn export sales and shipments lag badly since t...
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.