General Comments Brazilian farmers were allowed to start planting soybeans as of this past weekend. From 15 June until 15 September no soybeans were supposed to be grown anywhere in Brazil in order to keep the soybean rust fungus under control. (It seems that has been the case since the serious issues with soybean rust in 2002/03.)Brazilian farmers tend to plant one-third of their soybean crop as super short, a third as short and a third as medium varieties to spread the risk and enable more efficient use of harvest equipment. The short season soybeans also allow the second corn crop to be planted from January to February, and its harvest begins in June -- just as Brazil enters into its dry weather period.About 50 percent of Brazil's cor...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.