General Comments It was one of those rare "risk on" days today following what seems like weeks of fear-related selling. The fiscal cliff suddenly has become the fiscal slope. Today's U.S. housing data was reported by some news outlets as being the best since 2006, with the housing inventory down 22 percent from a year ago. Crude oil was very strong on fears the turmoil in Israel and Gaza might escalate and cause oil flow interruptions. The dollar index was losing 0.4 percent.Corn, soybean and wheat futures were strong from the start Sunday afternoon and held much of that strength throughout the day. Corn was actually the leader on talk that logistical snarls in Brazil were pushing corn business back to the U.S.This is a holiday-shorten...
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.