General Comments: As wildfires engulfed parts southern California today, it seems fitting to use a firefighting adage to describe the grain markets. Firefighting, it has been said, is 98 percent boring drudgery and 2 percent excitement. The grains markets appear to be offering traders the same deal, and today was part of the 98 percent. Corn, wheat, and soybean futures all traded a narrow range today, biding time until Thursday’s WASDE report from USDA. Soybeans were the most active contract, trading an 11-cent range, but finished the day in an unexciting manner, down fractionally. The USDA Export Inspections report showed 20.6 million bushels of corn were shipped abroad last week, along with 54.6 million bushels of soybeans...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.