The Livestock and Meat trade data will be released Monday after the holiday weekend; it will likely show exports way down in May reflecting the COVID-19 impact on slaughter and offsetting the high profile gains made in April, especially in pork shipments to China. With the COVID shutdown in plants and bottlenecks in fabrication, hogs are still backlogged, though last week’s slaughter seems to be slowly but surely working its way through the jam. Saturday kills recently have been looking like any other weekday, and slaughter weights are down about 3 pounds from the peak – though still at 291 pounds. Total head slaughtered last week was 2.64 million head, which was 110.7 percent of last year (though that week was impacted...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.