With two weeks of the crop year left to account for, wheat shipments are more than 120 million bushels below USDA's estimate. There seems no way that gap can be made up, and a substantial volume of old crop sales will be carried over into 2014/15. General Comments It was another day of volatility for the soy complex with July soybeans hitting a new high close. July soybeans have seen daily trading ranges in excess of 30 cents each day this week, and today the contract poked into an old chart gap going back to July 2013. However, profit taking and hedge selling from South America took soybean prices well below session highs at the close. July did close up 13.5 cents for the day, but that was 18 cents below the day's high. Interestingly, No...
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...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.