Cattle Market to Tighten in 2020 Going into 2020, the beef cattle inventory is likely to be down. The cattle inventory data will be released by USDA on 31 January, but based on 2019 trends, it is likely to be down from the herd as of January 2019, which, at 94.8 million head was slightly larger than at the start of 2018. The cattle cycle has been up since January 2014, when the herd hit 70-plus year low at 88.2 million head. But, 2019 saw herd liquidation as heifer retention decreased and the number of females in the slaughter mix increased. Through the end of November, beef cow slaughter was up 3 percent, the highest in more than five years. Dairy cow slaughter was up 2.3 percent. This is the fifth year of increased total cow...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
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.