The rate of inflation for food increased 0.4 percent in February 2014, which was four times the core rate and the highest monthly increase since September 2013.The news is full of food inflation stories of late. General core inflation, which excludes energy and agriculture, is creeping at a very manageable pace. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) was up 0.1 percent in February 2014, the same pace as January 2014. For the year-over-year comparison, the February 2014 CPI was up 1.1 percent over February 2013. That is down from a 1.6 percent pace in January 2014 and the lowest 12-month inflation rate since October. The key significance is that the Federal Reserve's target inflation rate is 2 percent and the current rate falls below that, which is...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.