It has been easy to be bearish on grain and soybean prices so far during the 2019/2020 crop cycle. In fact, it has been easy to be bearish during the last several crop cycles. The U.S. has seen several years of big corn crops, but so have South America and the Black Sea region. Competition for shares of world corn trade has been stout, and the U.S. share of that trade has declined. China’s 25 percent tariff on imports of U.S. soybeans imposed in July 2018 cut sharply into U.S. soybean exports as Chinese buyers shifted their demand to Brazil and Argentina. This did allow U.S. soybean exports to other destinations to increase, but not nearly enough to offset lost Chinese demand. Moreover, total Chinese soybean demand was flattening eve...
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.