Markets have certainly poured over the corn, soybean and wheat 2012-13 supply and demand estimates that USDA released last Thursday. Not much has been said about the minor crops of barley, sorghum and oats. The likely reason is that these crops truly are "minor' these days – they simply don't attract much attention. Here are a few comments on these crops: Barley Northern plains farmers planted 3.3 million acres of barley this year compared to 2.6 million acres in 2011. There are two primary reasons for the renewed interest in barley. The first is that $7.00 or higher malting barley contracts were available last fall and many producers made the decision early to go with barley. The second reason is that the dry fall and spring across the...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.