Profits in Perspective: The Financial Times recently implied excessive profiting by a handful of owners of global grain trade firms by highlighting that nearly $250 billion in profits had been acquired during the past decade's agricultural bull market. This profit was compared with that of major banks and manufacturing companies. However, there are some facts to keep in perspective: $250 billion is just 2.37 percent of the $10.531 trillion in agricultural products that the WTO database says moved through global trade during that same period. Based on Census and S&P data, the net income from food sales is 1.9 percent. Even more profitable beverages and tobacco cannot beat the 21.8 percent net return in the information technology sect...
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.