World Perspectives
livestock

Livestock Roundup: Beef and Cattle Prices Starting Year Strong

Christmas and New Year’s Day fell on a weekend this year, and a deep freeze fell on much of the country over the holidays, all of it impacting the slaughter totals at the end of the year. Labor schedules over the holidays were a factor, so was cold weather, which further impacted delivery of cattle as the supply dropped.     The table below shows the impact of the drought, and the effect it had on herd liquidation throughout 2022. The December Cattle on Feed report showed 11.7 million head on feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity; that was 97 percent of last December, which also saw the largest number of December placements on record.   Historically, looking at the data, the December 2022 inventory would...

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Market Commentary: Yield, Acreage Increases Sink Corn, Soybeans

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Venezuela Oil Situation and Oil Price Impacts

The world woke up on Jan. 3 to news of the arrest of Nicolas Maduro, the self-proclaimed president of Venezuela. Few expected this move from the U.S. administration, but in hindsight it may not have been surprising. The Biden administration had placed a $25 million bounty on Maduro through the...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Market Commentary: Yield, Acreage Increases Sink Corn, Soybeans

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The world woke up on Jan. 3 to news of the arrest of Nicolas Maduro, the self-proclaimed president of Venezuela. Few expected this move from the U.S. administration, but in hindsight it may not have been surprising. The Biden administration had placed a $25 million bounty on Maduro through the...

feed-grains

WASDE Corn - Jan 2026

USDA’s Jan estimate for 2025/26 U.S. corn is for larger production and higher feed residual usage to result in greater ending stocks: Corn production is estimated at 17.0 billion bushels, up 269 million on a 0.5-bushel increase in yield to 186.5 bushels per acre and a 1.3-million acre ris...

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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.

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