Soybean and product prices moved lower overnight while grains climbed higher, reversing yesterday’s pattern of direction. The volume of trade was notably higher than during recent overnight sessions, probably in response to a sharp decline of the U.S. dollar against most other major currencies. CME open interest (O/I) in corn increased by 22,088 contracts. It was little changed in soybeans, but O/I in soymeal jumped almost 8,000 contracts. O/I in the two winter wheat markets also increased roughly 8,000 contracts each. It appears that while noncommercials were not afraid to add to their large short positions in corn and wheat, they took on more soymeal as a hedge against drought-related Argentine crop losses. The rationale is that wit...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to discuss agriculture and non-tariff trade barriers ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington later this month, potentially opening the door to additional U.S. agricultural purchases or improved marke...
The U.S. will observe Labor Day on Monday, 7 September. U.S. markets and the WPI office will be closed that day. The next edition of Ag Perspectives will be published Tuesday, 8 September...
Key Takeaways: Drought and changes to the multi-year trend in cow slaughter and retention have the potential to dramatically alter beef trim supplies and pricing, and WPI specifically models three different drought scenarios for fall 2026. Based on our models, WPI expects 90 percent lean...
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.