High Leverage, Limited Results President Donald Trump’s strategy of using the imposition of tariffs to extract trade concessions is working but not in a manner of value to agriculture. The EU had said it would not be bullied into making concessions, although it now states that it is open to discussion even if the room to maneuver is limited. Limited maneuvering is certainly the result of negotiations between Washington and Seoul in updating the KORUS agreement. Agriculture was completely dropped from a result that remains protectionist. Steel exports from South Korea will be handled similarly to the voluntary restraint agreements on autos between the U.S. and Japan in the 1980s, and South Korea will extend the number of U.S.-made au...
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.