It is not that grain and soy futures markets are on vacation exactly, but in recent days it almost feels that way. One could easily read a book while watching the markets today. The corn market is the only one moving much with the December contract managing a 6-cent range, and it is up 4 cents at last look. That will have to do for today’s excitement as prices of the other markets show little change. Markets are caught between weather forecasts primarily for South America and the daily signals about progress or lack thereof in finalizing Phase One of an agreement to end the trade dispute and tariff war between the U.S. and China. And, those signals are often contradictory. An example occurred this week when Chinese offici...
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.