According to the Purdue University/CME Ag Economy Barometer, farmers’ outlook is at its lowest level post COVID. The index was 113 in March, which is down 12 points from February and 36 points from March 2021. It is the lowest since April 2020 when the index was 96 – which was the only time since 2016 that the index was below 100. The March index came from a producer survey conducted 14-18 March – about three weeks after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. A question about the impact of the war was added to the survey. Some topline take aways are below: The Barometer is based on farmers’ perspective on current conditions, expectations for future conditions, and includes a Farm Financial Performance Index, a...
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.