As expected, the weekend’s developments in the Black Sea drove market action to start the week. Over the weekend, U.S. and Russian diplomats ended discussions in a stalemate and the State Department urged U.S. citizens to avoid travel to Ukraine and Russia. Later, the U.S. ordered nonessential personnel to leave the embassy in Ukraine and President Biden said he expects Russia to invade Ukraine. On Monday afternoon, news broke that the Pentagon has placed “hundreds” of U.S. troops on standby to prepare for a possible deployment to eastern Europe. The West and NATO reputedly have plans to put sanctions on Russia, but none have been placed (to WPI’s knowledge) as of this writing. Russia’s response to any sanction...
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.