Scavenger Fish To help offset the adverse impacts of the trade war, the Trump Administration has set up a program to purchase surplus commodities off the market, including $300 million worth of pork. The largest single beneficiary has been Brazilian-owned JBS, making 26 percent of the sales. Beneficiary may be a loose term since it has won by offering to make the least amount of money from the contract. It shouldn’t matter whether the company is Brazilian-owned any more than Europeans should care that the largest information technology companies are based in the U.S. They provide services to Europeans and JBS provides a service to Americans. One difference, however, is the Brazilian habit of exploiting trade tensions. The trade war...
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.