Surplus butter stocks are at their lowest level in years and its price has increased 80 percent faster than already inflated overall grocery prices. The causes include a contracted dairy herd due to higher feed costs, a lack of labor at processing plants, and the bias toward other dairy products (milk, ice cream, cheese) in the dairy class price system. Chicago futures indicate that prices will moderate over the coming year, dropping by 25 percent in the October/November 2023 deferred contracts. Between now and then, butter imports are near their record level in 2020, and margarine made from low-linolenic soybeans or alternative processing provide a substitute. Animal welfare and environmental regulations may lead to the next push hi...
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.