Since COVID and the bottlenecks it created in livestock slaughter, populism has been the hallmark of agriculture policy debates on Capitol Hill, especially livestock, and even more so the cattle market. With the beginning of the 2023 farm bill process, that hasn’t slowed, even though the cattle cycle and the economics of the livestock and meat sectors have shifted dramatically. There have been four straight years of cattle herd liquidation, and with drought the highest cow slaughter ever, the highest heifer slaughter in two decades, and a bow wave of record beef production (2022 was the fourth consecutive record). And that demand resulted in high cattle prices. Cattle prices will remain high based on tight supplies. The culling...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.