Friday’s reports from USDA have come and gone raising very little fanfare in the process. There were mild surprises in that NASS raised corn and soybean yields slightly when conventional wisdom presumed they would be lowered. However, reductions in harvested area for both crops offset most of the impact of higher yields. NASS also estimated U.S. winter wheat plantings at a historically low 30.8 million acres, down about 350,000 from last year and the smallest in 111 years. Nevertheless, NASS’s estimate was about as expected. There was lots of jiggering of the numbers for both the U.S. and world 2019/20 supply/demand balances in the January WASDE, but they resulted in only limited changes to the various bottom lines. In other wo...
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.