Warming Weather, Cooling Markets This week cattle prices dropped, which is unusual for seasonal markets, moving into the spring and summer high-demand seasons. In fact, some had thought that the unseasonably warm weather across the East and Midwest might hurry the bullish market for beef, but instead we've seen a very quiet week for cash cattle. Perhaps we're testing the limits of consumers' price elasticity and the depth of packers' wallets with recent price run-ups. Look at this cooling off in price to be just that -- a cooling -- and nothing more. Demand will heat up over the summer, even if it is curbed at the top-end by retail prices. Farm Bill and Russia Trade Hearings There were a couple hearings on Capitol Hill today of inter...
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.
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...