CME's research into the cattle trade discovered that while heifers are lighter, they are more uniform and higher yielding than steers and frequently have higher quality grades. Heifer Delivery on Cattle Contracts Coming In early January, CME proposed allowing the delivery of heifers against live cattle futures contracts. The idea had been prompted by an early 2012 request from the cattle industry. Traditionally, only steers were eligible because of concerns about quality and reproduction cycles. However, CME's research into the cattle trade discovered that while heifers are lighter, they are more uniform and higher yielding than steers and frequently have higher quality grades. This disproved the notion that those long hedgers and others...
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.