Years of Missing Beef A Japanese Health Ministry panel approved the age increase from 20 months to 30 months for cattle supplying imported beef. The 20-month age maximum was agreed to by the U.S. in December 2003, despite the lack of a scientific basis and thus the prospect of challenging it in a WTO dispute settlement case. The U.S. capitulated to the limit, believing it would be removed sooner than it would take to litigate a challenge. Given the usual two- to three-year timeframe for dispute settlement procedures, U.S. beef suppliers may have suffered a half-dozen years more market limitation than would otherwise have been the case. The Japanese government must still seek public comment and negotiate with supplying countries on the ti...
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.