The U.S. drought has pushed corn and soybean prices to new all-time highs following the drought-reduced production in Brazil and Argentina. Problems in Russia and the potential for drought-reduced wheat production in Australia now threaten to push wheat another leg higher, although we are still not close to the all-time wheat highs set in 2008. U.S. and world stocks-to-use ratios will shrink to very small levels. The world now will hope that Brazil and Argentina produce record soybean crops in 2013. Anything less than the projected huge crops there will mean another year of strong, erratic markets. The world is now living on the hope that weather patterns will turn much more favorable across the major crop producing regions to prevent wor...
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.