Corn and soybean futures were higher in the Sunday evening session with wheat steady, and that is the way the market opened this morning as well. There was renewed optimism that the U.S. and China are very close to reaching an agreement on trade. President Trump has reportedly asked the Chinese to drop the tariffs on U.S. agricultural products. It also looks like China will import as much as $50 billion of those products annually, which could include ethanol. Funds increased their net short positions in wheat, corn and soybeans last week as expected. They are now estimated to be short 76,000 contracts of Chicago wheat, 131,000 contracts of corn and 61,000 contracts of soybeans. Weather isn’t an immediate issue anywhere, but it might...
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.