Push Local Retail Apparently the hosts of this summer's Olympic Games in London had a clause requiring all poultry being served to originate in the UK, purportedly to promote sustainability. McDonald's initially negotiated a waiver that allows up to 90 percent of the chicken it serves to come from Brazil and Thailand, likely correctly calculating that those two countries can produce and deliver chicken more efficiently, and thus sustainably, to London than the local chaps. Under pressure from locals, the multinational corporation has now reversed course and said all of its Olympic-served chicken products will have British passports. So-called "buy national" requirements in government procurement seem bad enough, but now apparently privat...
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.