Whether or not one considers today's August WASDE to be bearish depends on one's pre-report assumptions and the extent to which bearish expectations have already been priced by the market.USDA's August corn and production estimates for the 2014/15 crops are based on farmer surveys and observations from sample plots that give them far more authority than USDA's previous projections based on trends and modeling. Consequently, the August WASDE is always met with considerable anticipation. In recent years, it was to see how poorly USDA viewed production prospects for one or more crops. This year, it has been just the opposite with anticipation to find out how good crop production prospects are in the view of USDA/NASS analysts. The growing seas...
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.