General Comments After the costliest election ever, President Obama won a second term, the Democrats increased their margin of control in the Senate (though not by enough to command super majorities), and the Republicans remained comfortably in control of the House despite the net loss of a few seats. In other words, nothing in the Washington political landscape has changed. President Obama won by a surprisingly large electoral vote margin, although the final count of the popular vote will probably show a much narrower margin. The big question now is whether the gridlock of the last two years will continue, or whether the ever closer threat of the political "cliff" of tax increases and sequestration budget cuts in January will force the...
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.