News that the U.S. and the EU pulled back from a potentially escalating trade war gave financial markets a boost late yesterday, and the agreements between President Trump and EU President Juncker included a promise that the EU would buy more U.S. soybeans. Algorithmic trading programs read the headlines, and their buying helped push soybean futures higher by double digits in overnight trade. President Trump said that the EU agreed to “buy a lot of soybeans,” but there was no effort to quantify what that meant. In fact, President Juncker cannot direct the purchases of numerous private EU oilseed processors. Limited Argentine supplies and the China-driven premium for Brazilian soybeans mean the EU has to buy more from the U.S. no...
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.