General Comments It was a very quiet day from a news perspective. Following yesterday's debacle, financial markets were steady early but then gradually gained strength. Crude oil was up $1.50-2.00 and solidly above $80. The dollar traded both sides of unchanged.Agricultural markets were back to trading weather following yesterday's clobbering in the general bearish assault on all markets. The weather story is the same as it has been for weeks. There is little or no rain in sight for the southern and eastern Corn Belt, and it might getter hotter than the hubs of Hell in the far western Corn Belt. The far extended forecasts still show a hint of improved moisture chances, but that puts us into the week of 4 July without relief. The market i...
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.