Packer Margins Deep Red; Beef Herd Down in 2012 Beef packer margins last week sunk to -$125.50, according to the Sterling Beef Profit Tracker, with feedyard margins at -$1.77 per head. Cattle futures closed lower today with some profit taking before Friday's Cattle Inventory report. March feeder cattle were down 1.375, April down 0.925 and May down 0.975.Industry expectations, however, are that beef cattle numbers will be down as of 1 January 2012. Last year inventory was 92.6 million head. The average guesstimate is a 1.6 percent drop in the cattle herd, for a total of 91.1 million head. That is on par with 1958, when cattle inventory was 91.176 million head. The difference is that average carcass weight was 575 pounds in 1958; the 20...
What You Need to Know Today: Declining crop conditions ratings and shaky results from the Pro Farmer crop tour sent grains sharply higher on Tuesday. The Pro Farmer tour in Ohio pegged the state yield at 180.18 BPA, about 5.5 BPA below the tour’s 2025 estimate. Similarly, the Pro Farmer...
Based on a Depression-era statute, President Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of exports to the U.S., or about 5.2 percent of the $383 billion worth of goods the U.S. imported from Canada in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Of that total, about $39.3 billion was agricu...
Key Takeaways: Brazil’s growing role in global agriculture is accompanied by a major vulnerability: the country imports approximately 88 percent of its fertilizer needs. High natural gas costs and development challenges have limited domestic nitrogen and potash production despite Brazil&...
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.