The slaughter numbers for last week (see the table at the end of the report) show the impact of the Christmas holiday, which fell on a Friday. There was no slaughter of cattle or hogs reported on Christmas, and very light slaughter on Saturday. With Christmas falling on a Friday, the impact of the holiday break is larger than when it falls on another weekday. The same is the case for New Year’s Day, which is tomorrow, though the drop in slaughter is not as large as on Christmas. Going into next week, NCBA’s negotiated cash sale plan goes into effect. The group will monitor the weekly sales of fed cattle by region and by type of sale – negotiated, formula and contract - to monitor whether cattle marketings to packers...
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.