Tomorrow is the USDA monthly Cattle on Feed report. The industry pre-report estimate is that placements in May will total 95.9 percent of May 2012 because of a 60 percent decline in imports from Mexico (see WPI 6 June 2013). Marketings are also down on negative feedlot margins and expected to come in at 97.9 percent of last year. USDA also reports that red meat production was down in May by 1 percent compared to May 2012. Beef slaughter was down but offset somewhat by higher slaughter weights and pork down 1 percent based on slaughter, with weights also down by 1 percent. Veal was down 12 percent from last year. Picking up the slack is broiler production, which in April 2013 was up 6.6 percent from last April. Both the number of birds sla...
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.