No Ag Trade Details in Debates Democratic primary candidates for the U.S. presidency debated this week, and little was said about trade and nothing about agriculture. While the fight with China was referenced, most of the focus was on free healthcare, free college, a more open immigration policy, less guns and greater equality. As the candidates challenge each other for the support of far-left activists, one headline called it the party of bad ideas seeking to replace the party of no ideas. Agriculture is unlikely to be a focus, and candidates tend to avoid providing the nitty gritty details that support their positions on trade or any other topics. A Beef with Free Trade The EU and Mercosur surprisingly came to agreement on a tr...
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.