Rationalizing More MFP China has flexibility to delay the volume of its Phase One agreement purchasing under a force majeure provision of the agreement. The Trump Administration appears to be acquiescing to the reality of a Chinese economy unable to meet its normal commitments at this time due to the coronavirus outbreak. This leniency will likely hold provided Beijing does not turn around and instead buy a bunch of agricultural products from Australia and South America. Notably, U.S. farmers may not be very upset about the delay. They have just received the third and supposedly “final” installment of the Market Facilitation Payments (MFP) intended to compensate them for the trade war with China. Farm lobbyists in Washington ha...
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.