Commodity markets jolted higher today, not because of any tightening of supply and demand but due to the technical reaction to Europe failing to meet financial bets on the level of economic stimulus it would impose. Dumb versus Smart Labels The U.S. grocery industry says that its SmartLabels will be available on 80 percent of all food products within five years. A SmartLabel enables the consumer to access over 350 attributes about a product during the purchasing process. However, anti-food technology groups demand that the product attributes they most dislike (ex. GMOs) must be physically printed on the product. The irony is that when asked why organic foods aren’t labeled for the toxic chemicals used in their production since consumers a...
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.