In varying degrees, world grain and oilseed markets have been forced to deal with concerns raised by tight supplies, or at least perceptions of tight supplies since 2008. A number of weather-related problems during the last five years have pared back production of grains and soybeans in certain important producing countries and regions around the world. Among the adverse weather problems garnering the most publicity were the Russian drought in 2010, the drought in Brazil and Argentina during 2011/12 and the major drought in the U.S. during the summer of 2012. Each of these cases caused crop losses for important suppliers to world markets and caused prices to gyrate higher in volatile fashion.However, there were other incidents of unfavora...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.