The fundamental story line for 2013 is the rather dramatic transition from tight supplies and the need to limit demand at the beginning of the year to the relative abundance of supplies (except for soybeans) as we enter 2014.Maybe it is just us, but somehow this last day of 2013 does not feel like a typical New Year's Eve. There does not seem to be the usual amount of anticipation that usually surrounds the ending of the old year and the beginning of the new one. The hoopla that normally surrounds the widely televised celebration in New York City's Times Square and the dropping of the huge crystal ball to mark the transition seems subdued this year. We doubt we will stay up to watch it tonight.Perhaps the fact that the New Year happens to b...
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.