Despite the recent U.S. tariffs slowing two-way trade traffic, the otherwise booming economy has pushed diesel supplies down to their lowest level in 14 years. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that the distillate fuel inventory, which includes both diesel and home heating oil, totaled 117.7 million barrels at the end of June. That is the lowest end-of-June inventory since 2004, and the stocks have been less than the five-year average for almost all of 2018. The inventory level is driven by the trucking sector’s diesel consumption, which increased in January-June versus the same period in 2017. EIA estimates U.S. distillate fuel consumption has averaged 4.12 million barrels/day so far in 2018, up 5 percent com...
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.