Smithfield, the largest pork processing plant in the U.S., announced that it has decided to run its Tar Heel, NC facility only four days a week and suggested it may also reduce production at its Clinton, NC plant due to the impact of PEDv. PEDv Udate The porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) is spreading. According to the National Animal Health Laboratory Network, there were 300 new cases last week, bringing the total to 4,757. A case can range from a single pig to an entire herd at one site. The virus was first discovered in May 2013, and there have been an estimated 4-5 million pigs lost to it since then, roughly 4 percent of the annual slaughter. Rabobank reports that about 60 percent of the U.S. herd and 28 percent of the Mexican her...
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.