North American Livestock The semi-annual estimate of combined U.S. and Canadian swine and cattle herds was released yesterday. As of 1 January, all cattle and calves in the U.S. and Canada totaled 106 million or 101 percent of year-ago levels. As of December 2017, the inventory of all hogs and pigs in the two countries totaled 87.6 million head, which was 102 percent of the previous year and 106 percent of 2015. The North American swine herd has grown a cumulative 12 percent over the past five years versus 4 percent for the cattle herd. Swine efficiency was a major factor last year. The semi-annual pig crop of 80.8 million head was 102 percent of the same period a year prior and 105 percent of the second half of 2015. Semi-annual farrowin...
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.