The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its February Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) last week. Those projections offer a glimmer of hope that the industry can start to chip away at the growing stocks of fuel. The ethanol consumption forecasts for 2019 and 2020 were raised to 951,000 barrels per day (bpd) and 952,000 bpd, respectively, versus the 2018 estimate of 939,000 bpd. The overall motor gasoline consumption is pegged at 9.35 million bpd for both 2019 and 2020, which will support higher ethanol blending next year. Biodiesel consumption is expected to be 164,000 bpd in 2019 and then increase to 174,000 bpd in 2020. Those biodiesel forecasts are projected against production levels of 144,000 bpd in 2019 and 158,...
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.