Except for wheat, the CBOT and CME’s major ag markets were uniformly lower in a relatively unexciting trading session Thursday. Wheat managed to escape the mid-holiday doldrums after news broke that a civilian bulk cargo vessel hit a Russian sea mine in the western Black Sea. The obvious risk the event poses to additional grain shipments sent wheat futures higher, though they could not quite match Tuesday’s rally high. Earlier this week, the wheat rally pulled corn higher too, but that was not the case on Thursday. Corn futures and the entire soy complex ended lower as weather forecasts show strong chances of heavy rainfall for central Brazil and Argentina over the next two weeks. The bearish weather implications, combined with...
Weather concerns and the impacts of the war in Iran helped push wheat and corn to sharp gains Tuesday, with both markets blowing past key technical resistance levels. The weather is now coupled with geopolitical tensions that look increasingly hard to resolve, which is giving funds the perfect...
Congress is moving forward with its FY 2027 spending bills, while also still working to address FY 2026 funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is still in a shutdown. The House Agriculture-FDA Appropriations Subcommittee marked up and passed its FY 2027 bill. The House bill prov...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Tunisian researchers have been able to fully sequence the genomes of two local durum wheat types that have been grown in Tunisia for generations. They say that this “could be the key to developing more climate-resistant duru...
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.