Brazil Raises Corn Crop Estimate, Keeps Soybeans the Same Brazil's crop supply agency (CONAB) today raised its forecast for the 2012 Brazilian corn crop by almost 2 MMT to 69.48 MMT based on an excellent second crop. However, it maintained its forecast for the country's 2012 soybean crop at 66.37 MMT and lowered its forecast for the wheat crop from 5.1 MMT to 5.03 MMT.It is significant that this is the first year since 2001 that Brazil's corn production exceeded its soybean crop. Corn production has been increasing across Brazil in recent years as farmers in the South have planted more corn in the spring and farmers in the Center West have expanded plantings after their soybean harvest. The country's growing poultry and swine sector have...
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.