The rail strike appears to have been diverted. That is a relief to ag markets, and to the livestock, poultry and dairy sector – especially those segments that are out of position for feed supply and rely on regular deliveries, such as dairy in California where feed deliveries have gotten dangerously low already this year, cattle feeding in the southern Plains, and broiler production. According to the National Chicken Council (NCC), broiler growers receive about 27 million bushels of corn and 11 million bushels of soymeal via rail each week. Also, consider that somewhere between 65 to 70 percent of ethanol is shipped by rail; a shut down would have led to lower production of ethanol and DDGS for feeding. In the end, the k...
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.