It was a quiet trading session overnight. Corn, soybeans and wheat were all slightly higher with closing gains of a penny, 2 cents and 2-3 cents, respectively. The week ended with Washington (and the rest of the country) watching the Senate’s Supreme Court vote today. The monthly U.S. jobs report was disappointing, but the unemployment rate is the lowest since 1969. The weather forecast for the Corn Belt continues to look extremely wet. The map below shows the seven-day accumulated precipitation. Approximately 40 percent of the Corn Belt could receive as much as three to seven inches of rain, which will come on already saturated soil in many areas. This rain will delay or slow harvest progress, but it shouldn’t result in apprec...
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.