Pre-Emptive Ethanol Action Scuttlebutt is that at least part of the ethanol industry may decide to request a temporary waiver or a temporary lowering of the RFS mandate. It is a pre-emptive move out of fear that they could lose it all if left to the politicians in a crisis. Indeed, the heart of the Corn Belt worsens by the day and the optics could get very ugly. Already the Korean Feed Millers have requested that the U.S. back off from turning animal feed into ethanol. If the media grabs the story and portrays feed buyers in rich countries outbidding hungry children in poor countries, and animals being forced into slaughter while ethanol plants continue turning dwindling amounts of corn into inedible alcohol, the politicians will react s...
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.