Dairy producers are entering a new era with milk exports at about twice their traditional level and about 50 percent greater than recent highs. This trend coincides with a new dairy insurance program in the 2014 Farm Bill, margin insurance. Milk Production, Exports and Margin Insurance The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) report released yesterday shows that compared with the same month a year ago, February 2014 milk production was up 1.4 percent, production per cow (in the top 23 states) increased 21 pounds and there were 13,000 more head of dairy cattle. Yet, prices are still increasing. What is going on? First, beef prices remain at record highs and there were 1,000 fewer dairy cows than in February 2013, although cow nu...
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.