USDA yesterday released its annual updated long-term projections for U.S. production and global trade of all major commodities. The projections are in many respects an exercise of futility, since it is almost assured the projections will not be accurate because of the vagaries of weather and technology. Nevertheless, they do serve a useful purpose in providing some sense of what the future may hold.There are a few things in USDA's soybean projections that are questionable. Among these are the following: Soybean Yields Versus Corn Yields USDA's long-term projections call for average U.S. corn yields to grow faster than average soybean yields. The data forecast average U.S. corn yields being 3.73 times the average soybean yield in 2018-22...
Key Takeaways: Brazil confirmed a Newcastle disease outbreak at a commercial turkey farm in Santa Catarina on 18 October, raising concerns about potential disruptions to poultry exports despite the outbreak being confined to a single facility thus far. Mexico and Malaysia have imposed nationwi...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Pakistan’s smaller wheat farmers have been holding protests to complain about the lack of a support price for wheat and the potential expansion of GMO crop production. They also want the reinstatement of PASSCO, the governme...
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.