Corn Argentina Argentina’s corn harvest is progressing slowly but gaining speed. Harvest gained 3 percent last week, bringing the total to 27.6 percent, which is 16 percent behind last year’s pace. Heavy rains during the past few days have delayed harvest in the corn belt. Farmers are now assuming prices they received two weeks ago ($245/MT FAS) are no longer available and they are unlikely to see such prices again this year. This is putting more pressure on farmers to increase sales and WPI estimates Argentine farmers still need to market 20 MMT of corn. Two weeks ago, sales were slow and featured small volumes but last week sales started to increase. Prices in the local market averaged $210/MT for prompt d...
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.