The CBOT was mixed to end the week and start the month of March with livestock futures extending their rallies amid strong fundamentals. Grain trade, however, was less decisive with wheat futures dropping sharply lower amid greater competition from Ukraine and a bearish breakdown in technical conditions. Corn felt pressure from weaker wheat and snapped a four-day winning streak while soybeans and soymeal pushed higher amid export demand for the latter. Funds were net sellers in wheat and corn but pared back more of their short positions in soybeans as early Brazilian yields disappoint. All week, the market has felt like it is at an inflection point where a trend one way or the other is going to accelerate quickly. Friday’s trad...
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
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.