A meme circulating on the internet, likely started by R-CALF, goes like this: Ok, a 1300-pound animal is bought for $0.95 per pound by the packers and 40 percent of the animal is waste, which leaves 780 pounds of meat. Now take that 780 pounds multiplied by the retail price of $7.79 per pound and the total value is $6,076.20! After deducting the original cost of the animal at $1,235.00, it becomes clear that the big four meat packers plus the retailers are making a whopping $4,841.20, which is four times what the rancher made for producing all that meat. Both the rancher and the consumer are getting screwed. This of course totally ignores the labor- and capital-intensive contributions of the packer and retailer in converting the animal in...
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.