General Comments It was more of the same for commodity and financial markets today as investor/speculators again scrambled to liquidate long positions. Stocks also worked lower but wound up closing mixed. A late recovery pushed the Dow into the green, and it finished with a 19-point gain. Asian stocks were weak and European stocks were mixed. Worries about Spain's ability to deal with its debt pressured the euro lower versus the dollar.Crude oil and grains led most commodities lower again. The NYMEX spot crude oil contract fell $2.63 to $102.78 for the biggest two-day drop since mid-December. Possible release of oil reserves spurred profit taking. One exception to commodities' down day was NY copper, which showed a small gain.For grains...
What You Need to Know Today: Declining crop conditions ratings and shaky results from the Pro Farmer crop tour sent grains sharply higher on Tuesday. The Pro Farmer tour in Ohio pegged the state yield at 180.18 BPA, about 5.5 BPA below the tour’s 2025 estimate. Similarly, the Pro Farmer...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Egypt is the largest importer of Brazilian maize in the first six months of 2026. Egypt imported about 28.4 percent of maize exports, or about 1.7 million MT. Iran was the third-largest importer at 14.5 percent, or 900,000 MT, fol...
Based on a Depression-era statute, President Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of exports to the U.S., or about 5.2 percent of the $383 billion worth of goods the U.S. imported from Canada in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Of that total, about $39.3 billion was agricu...
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.