Data from the first half of 2020 shows the pandemic’s impact on trade with U.S. agricultural exports down 3 percent compared with the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, there was a 4 percent drop in ethanol exports, which is a surprisingly small amount. While food demand changed, it mostly impacted the where and how – the total amount of calories consumed may only have changed at the lowest income level. By contrast, the Energy Information Agency says that global demand for petroleum and liquid fuels fell 8 percent in the first half of 2020. Exports to Brazil, the largest market, were down 16 percent, no doubt adversely impacted by the weaker value of the real. Brazilian sugarcane production is up but is going to sugar inste...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
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.