The EU’s provisional agreement last week on changes to the Common Agricultural Policy envisions farmers setting aside 3 percent of their arable land for biodiversity efforts. While the share of agricultural land used for crops in the U.S. is about 39 percent less than in Europe, the number of acres sown to row crops has already been in decline. Market analysts were shocked last week when USDA found farmers planting fewer acres than crop prices would otherwise indicate. Some say declining acreage use is due to higher input costs and land values. It does not appear that paid land set-asides are a cause. A key difference between Europe and the U.S. is land use as range or pastureland. Thirty-nine percent (173 million hectares) of...
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.