Beef Drought Looking at the cattle section of the table above (Livestock and Poultry Inventories), we see a huge increase in overall cattle receipts. USDA reports that 72 percent of the continental U.S. is now rated abnormally dry or worse compared to just 32 percent last year when the Southwest had a record herd sell-off. We note that only 39 percent of receipts are heifers, down from an average of about 42 percent last year at this time, however, drought-forced sales have pushed volumes higher indicating that a herd rebuilding is postponed until next year. McChicken Plans Last week we reported that consumers are seeking protein on a budget and that the top three restaurant chains were all sandwich shops. In that vein, McDonald's ne...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.