General Comments The weekend election results in France and Greece sponsored another flight to safety in world capital markets. The dollar and yen soared in early Sunday evening trade, and crude oil and basically every other commodity dropped. The austerity moves to control budget deficits appear to be replaced by the desire to stimulate economic growth. The problem, of course, is that there is no money to stimulate unless more is printed. It will be another interesting summer across Europe. So, the rest of the world became more concerned about growth, or lack thereof, and thus the weakness in commodities. There was also good weekend rain across much of the northern Corn Belt and it is raining today across the Delta and parts of the So...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.