After a brief midnight shutdown, Congress approved yet another modified stopgap budget package in the early hours of this morning. This is the fifth continuing resolution (CR) for FY 2018. It was passed in the Senate at 2 a.m. (EST) by a vote of 71-28 and in the House at about 5:30 a.m. (EST) by a vote of 240-186; the president signed the bill at 8:40 a.m. (EST). This is a $400 billion deal that will keep the government open until 23 March, but it also accommodates the two-year $1.3 trillion plan that was outlined in yesterday’s Livestock report (see Ag Perspectives, 8 February). The latest CR lifts the caps on defense spending, allowing $300 billion more over the next two years, and provides funding for disaster relief. It also exten...
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.