Soybean futures traded in a relatively narrow 8 cent range on both sides of Tuesday’s close before ending the session quietly with a small gain. As with corn, USDA’s March WASDE provided nothing to spark the soybean market’s interest, much less trigger any action. General Comments The market expected very little from USDA’s March WASDE, released today at 12 p.m. (EST), and it got even less than that. Changes to U.S and world supply/demand balances were few and far between. The principal surprise, if it can be called that, is that USDA left its 2015/16 export estimates for U.S. wheat, corn and soybeans unchanged, whereas most analysts expected minor decreases. The case can still be made that such reductions are due, but USDA apparently wan...
What You Need to Know Today: Agricultural commodities were mostly lower on the day, with red-hot soyoil a notable exception. Export sales were a bit underwhelming, particularly for corn with export sales down 52 percent week-over-week. The weakness in ag markets tracked crude oil weakness wit...
With the war in Iran affecting fuel and fertilizer prices, higher tariffs, weak commodity prices, ag labor constraints, and other factors, farm bankruptcies are now at a 6-year high, a signal of growing stress. During the month of April, 62 Chapter 12 bankruptcies were filed, which is a 1...
Food Inflation The Open Markets Institute, which is notably funded by several “anonymous” donors and liberal foundations, obtained a guest editorial in the New York Times in which they blame agribusiness concentration for higher grocery prices. This is their schtick and it is politi...
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.