About the time Hurricane Sandy roared ashore near Ocean City, New Jersey, meteorologists decided that it had lost its status as a tropical system. Sandy collided with a strong cold front that apparently turned it into a "post-tropical" storm with some of the characteristics of a nor'easter. We are sure that the storm's technical status made little difference to the millions of people in the eastern part of the U.S. that were affected by its high winds, torrential rains, record storm surges, and for those in the Appalachian Mountains above an elevation of 2,500 feet, a snowstorm of blizzard proportions.By any measurement Sandy was and is a superstorm, and its enormity is still hard to imagine. When it hit land, it had sustained winds of ab...
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.