Today’s USDA WASDE report was not what the trade thought, and yet it was not caught flat-footed. To some degree this is because years of guessing wrong on what USDA will say, it simply takes it as another observation point and not necessarily the Bible. This was reinforced by the fact that corn prices were slow to react to the report. Several minutes after its release, corn was still trading at a gain for the day. Perhaps it was the cognitive dissonance of USDA opining that 2021/22 U.S. corn exports will not be as large at the same time China has been buying the crop. Wheat had been on the defensive all morning, so it was a different story. Nonetheless, the report may have set the tops in the market, unless the weather situatio...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.