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: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.