Having been without significant scheduled data from USDA since 11 December because of the “lapse of funding” (as USDA politely puts it), it is easy to understand why the reports to be released tomorrow will command so much attention from markets and market analysts. As a reminder, these will include 1 December quarterly stocks, final yield and production estimates for U.S. corn and soybeans, and estimated planted acreage for U.S. winter wheat. As interesting as those numbers may be, most will probably focus on the February WASDE with USDA’s updated estimates of Southern Hemisphere crop production as well as fresh U.S. and world supply/demand estimates. Below are a number of questions that the reports will hopefully answer...
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.