General Comments Sunday afternoon's weather models stuck with the "heat dome" forecast, which gave us sharply higher trade through much of the night. Corn, soybean and wheat futures all had double-digit gains until early Monday morning forecasts hinted at a better chance of scattered rains following several days of very hot weather. There seems to be little dispute that it is going to get very hot very early in the growing season. The big question is how long will the heat last? Weekend rains across the Northern Plains and Corn Belt were also deemed disappointing by many. This hot and mostly dry U.S. weather pattern coupled with little or no relief for adverse weather conditions in many other parts of the world continue to sponsor this...
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.