Concern over the Ukrainian situation is given as the reason for today's U.S. stock market plunge. Grain and soy markets chopped around on both sides of yesterday's closes in nervous fashion. General Comments With Crimea's referendum over secession from Ukraine and potentially joining Russia scheduled for this weekend, the rhetorical barrage from the EU, U.S. and Russia is escalating. The West is pressing Russia to negotiate and threatening massive sanctions if it does not, but President Putin describes the situation as a domestic Ukrainian affair for which his country is not responsible. He shows no sign of acceding to the West's demands, and no one can predict with confidence how this standoff will end. Until equity and derivative marke...
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.