A cattle and sheep herding robot is being tested by the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. While the current model is more likely to replace herding dogs than cowboys and shepherds, the next generation will have more advanced features. North American Hogs and Pigs Inventory According to USDA’s most recent quarterly Hogs and Pigs report, total U.S. and Canadian inventory is up 2 percent (see breakdown below).Additionally, the semi-annual pig crop for the U.S. and Canada totals 74.3 million head to date, up about 1 percent from last year, and sows farrowed total 7.04 million head, an increase of less than 1 percent. According to Ag-Canada, 503,126 feeder pigs and 100,750 slaughter hogs came into the U.S. from Canada through the end of Ma...
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.