U.S. agricultural imports have been rising at a 6.42 percent annual rate over the past 25 years. Mostly due to duty-free goods under NAFTA, but also from Europe. By contrast, U.S. export market share for its major bulk commodities has been declining. There are many reasons for the latter, including diminishing return on investment, increasing production elsewhere, and policy distortions. By elevating prices, U.S. farm support policy encourages production both at home and abroad. Market access barriers in other markets encourages domestic production while reducing sales by foreign suppliers. More sinister was the conspiracy theory that the thousands of miscellaneous packets of seeds being sent to U.S. recipients, mostly from China, ar...
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.