The partial government shutdown continues with little or no progress in talks between Democrats and Republicans. The USDA said next Friday’s important series of reports will not be released. These reports will include the “final” 2018 U.S. corn and soybean production estimates, quarterly stocks numbers, winter wheat seeding estimate, and the revised WASDE. The data for these reports was collected during the first two weeks of December, before the shutdown began, but has not been analyzed. Outside of the monthly/quarterly reports, the government shutdown is leaving the trade in the dark about export sales. There are rumors that China has been actively buying soybeans from the U.S. but there is no way to confirm the rumors...
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.