With the fall harvest in its closing stages and production and total volumes of available corn and soybean supplies closely established, the market's attention will rapidly turn toward the demand side of the supply/demand ledger.Surprises in the November WASDE were pretty much limited to the 2014/15 U.S. corn production numbers. USDA lowered the average U.S. corn yield to 173.4 bushels/acre, a 0.8 bushels/acre decline from October, and thus reduced estimated production to 14.407 billion bushels or 68 million less than the October estimate. It had been widely expected that USDA would increase both the corn yield and production estimates at least slightly, so we suppose that USDA's November U.S. corn production numbers qualify as a surprise...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.