Row crops were weaker overnight, pressured by favorable statistics from yesterday’s Crop Progress report, and that weakness extended into the day session as well. Corn and soybean futures finished lower while wheat posted 5+ cent gains in purely consolidative trade. Even USDA’s announcement of 306,000 MT of soybeans sold to China for the coming crop year, plus 207,880 MT of corn sold to unknown destinations, failed to boost futures. China’s corn prices have risen sharply this year, with values in some areas up 20-26 percent this year. The driver has been tightening supplies, which has prompted the Chinese government to increase sales from the nation’s strategic reserves. Now, the government is looking to sell...
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.