Amid the news of an agreement to restart China-U.S. trade talks, China’s undefined promise to buy more U.S. commodities and the anticipation as well as uncertainty about the fate of the USMCA, USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) released its 2018 net farm income forecast. The estimates are as expected with large supplies, trade disputes, volatile global markets and a strong general economy. Nominal cash receipts are steady, inflation-adjusted receipts are down, and inputs and operations are more expensive, and government payments are up. Cash receipts will be up slightly on volume, driven by early-in-the-year sales prior to the tariffs placed on U.S. commodities by China, Canada, Mexico and others. For all commodities, cash...
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.