It was another day of big volume in the soy complex. While soybeans closed higher for a fourth session, corn and wheat failed to follow, or perhaps their drag pulled soybeans back to fundamental reality. There are still no new export sales. The Chinese are smart, and if they intend to buy, they will patiently wait for all the hoopla in the market to dissipate. If China does buy 8 MMT of U.S. soybeans, it might cost them $240 million more than buying them from Brazil. But that is small beer (0.03 percent) in the total bilateral trading relationship, and a price Xi Jinping might willingly absorb to avoid larger problems. For the week, all the major agricultural contracts except wheat closed higher. There was a new contract high in lean...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices dropped sharply with traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. There were reports that Iran was behind an attack on a cargo ship near the coast of Oman, which would be a violation of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran. Pr...
On Wednesday, the White House submitted a national security supplemental spending request for $87.6 billion. The majority of the request includes funding for the conflict in the Middle East, but there are agricultural provisions as well. The supplemental funding package includes more than $11 b...
Can we really expect a bushel of corn to carry an environmental passport throughout the entire food system? One that reliably documents its carbon footprint, biodiversity impacts, water use, soil carbon, and other environmental attributes all the way from the farm field to the consumer? This is...
From WPI Consulting
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.