World Perspectives

Local Sham Reprise; Generating Regenerative; Flogging Large Farms; Derriere Biting Policy

Local Sham Reprise USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, proving you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, is back with a reprise of the Eat Local mantra he cheer-led during the Obama years. Citing broken supply chains during COVID, he is spending $400 million to create the Food System Transformation Framework, which includes Regional Food Business Centers to coordinate (command and control) the redirection of the industry toward small and local. Never mind that there has been no USDA study of “a problem” or the feasibility of this over-priced and barreling “solution.” The populist anti-Big Ag activists on the left think this makes intuitive sense.  At Penn State where researchers have actually researched the situati...

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feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Market Commentary: Yield, Acreage Increases Sink Corn, Soybeans

The CBOT came under heavy selling pressure following the January WASDE as USDA unexpectedly increased U.S. corn acreage and yields. The USDA also added area to the soybean harvested and made a bearish cut to U.S. wheat demand, moves which sent all of the major commodity futures markets sharply...

India Holds Out; USMCA Friction; AI and Ag

India Holds Out The most disappointed of U.S. trading partners has to be India. It has long held hope that it would succeed China as the largest foreign supplier to the American market. It is a natural foil to China, which has been politely designated by Washington as a strategic competitor and...

energy

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

The CBOT came under heavy selling pressure following the January WASDE as USDA unexpectedly increased U.S. corn acreage and yields. The USDA also added area to the soybean harvested and made a bearish cut to U.S. wheat demand, moves which sent all of the major commodity futures markets sharply...

India Holds Out; USMCA Friction; AI and Ag

India Holds Out The most disappointed of U.S. trading partners has to be India. It has long held hope that it would succeed China as the largest foreign supplier to the American market. It is a natural foil to China, which has been politely designated by Washington as a strategic competitor and...

energy

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

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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