The February rally came at a very good time for U.S. farmers as that is the month the initial (and minimum) price guarantees are established for the federal crop revenue insurance programs. Producers now know exactly what those per acre guarantees will be for their spring-planted crops and will compare them with crop production costs, etc., using these numbers to help make 2018 planting decisions. Amazingly, the numbers for corn and soybeans are almost exactly what they were at this time a year ago. This is also after both U.S. crops had record-breaking production in 2017 with forecasts of much lower prices that year and well into 2018. However, corn and soybean prices simply never got as cheap as many analysts expected. Weather problems i...
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.