World Perspectives

Input Costs and Planting Intentions

As of early February, U.S. farmers are facing decade high fertilizer prices going into the spring planting season. Moreover, the overall fertilizer price index calculated by Green Markets North America jumped by the highest margin since the first week in September. There have been many factors impacting the market. In addition to increased demand for fertilizers, issues on the supply side, such as natural gas prices, fertilizer production disruptions resulting from Hurricane Ida, supply chain challenges, and transportation problems have helped push up prices. Of course, general inflationary pressures have had an impact as well.   Another key factor, however, is tariffs and sanctions. Potash is affected by Western sanctions on...

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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.

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