The hard red spring wheat tour is scheduled across the Northern Plains this week. The only problem is that the spring wheat harvest started last week and tour participants will have to hustle to tell us about the crop's potential when it's already in the bin. Every crop was planted early across the U.S. this past spring, and the hot and dry summer has pushed crops to a very early maturity, which will mean an early harvest. A railroad friend used to describe very fast-paced harvests as "weather directed." That is what we will see this year unless weather takes a late turn towards much cooler and wetter as the fall season approaches. Crop tours are as much (maybe more) social events as they are real crop fact-finding events. The tour dates...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.