Beef packer margins surged for a fourth consecutive week, jumping $108/head to $228 and marking the strongest profitability in more than two years. Margins rose on the combination of a $5.88/cwt decline in live cattle and an $13.20/cwt drop in dressed cattle prices, while the Choice cutout ease...
The U.S. Midwest received heavy snowfall this weekend and as snowflakes drifted lower so – apparently – did CBOT traders’ sentiments. The ag markets were almost entirely on the defensive to start the last month of the year with soyoil being the only major market to see meaning...
Ag as Affordability Solution Around 12 percent of Americans received federal food assistance (SNAP) and 10 percent are classified as living below the poverty line but financial analyst Michael W. Green has controversially calculated the threshold at $136,500/year. After all, a family of four li...
WHEAT The Argentine wheat harvest advanced nearly 14 percentage points this past week, reaching 30 percent of the total area. Good weather accelerated maturation in some fields at the same time forecasts of weekend rainfall pushed harvesters to move quickly. Yields continue to surprise, with so...
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.