General Comments Prior to the 11 January reports from USDA, grain and soy markets slumped because of a sense that prices had already gone high enough, that the long bull market was over, and that liquidation of long positions mostly held by non-commercials had taken over as the market's main driver. USDA's reports abruptly changed all of that. Grain and soybean supplies were lower than expected, especially so in the case of corn. Export demand for corn and wheat had been slow, but less visible domestic demand was more than making up for slack exports. The very brisk export and domestic demand soybeans were experiencing was old news, and the looming monster South American crop would inevitably limit demand for U.S. soybeans and products.I...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.