Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, has been bought by China's largest meat producer, Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd. Shuanghui is publically traded on the Shanghai Exchange. When/if finalized, this would be the largest acquisition of a U.S. firm by a Chinese firm. Shuanghui agreed to pay $4.7 billion -- or $34 per share, a 31 percent premium over the previous day's closing share price of $25.97 -- to acquire 100 percent of Smithfield, which has 460 farms that raise 15.8 million hogs per year. That equates to roughly 25 percent of the U.S. pork supply. The deal includes an agreement not to close any Smithfield facilities and to maintain the company's collective bargaining agreement with roughly 46,000 employees...
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.