Inside the Numbers The tables above tell a story about the beef, poultry and pork sectors. Beef slaughter is down about 6 percent, poultry is sustaining the cutbacks it started late last year, and pork is maintaining a slow and steady expansion. Pork producers are looking at their third consecutive profitable year; high corn prices last year kept them from expanding too fast, but that is paying off in the longer run. Poultry cutbacks are helping return some profitability to the sector; however, USDA is forecasting that Brazil will clearly overtake the U.S. as the top exporter this year. Meanwhile, the beef sector is still bleeding red. While feeders are back in the black with seasonally higher weights for cattle placed, packers are sti...
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.