The CBOT was mixed at mid-week with diverging weather patterns pushing corn and wheat in different directions. For the central and eastern Corn Belt, the weather forecast has turned drier in the past few days and is forecast to remain so over the next two weeks. Such early-season dryness correlates poorly to final yields and in some cases can benefit crops by forcing plants to establish deeper root systems as they search for available water. For the day, however, heavily-short funds looked at the weather map as a risk to their position and continued to cover. For wheat, the opposite trend was in play as favorable rains for parts of the Plains sent wheat futures sharply lower, though both the KC and Chicago markets found support at significa...
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.
The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) enters its mandated six-year review on 1 July. The original intent of the review is outlined in Article 34.7, which obligates members to: Provide recommendations and decide on appropriate actions. Extend the USMCA for another 16 years and meet aga...