Regional News Farmers across the UK, Ireland, France, and northern Germany are struggling to plant winter crops this fall due to heavy September rains. French winter wheat plantings are 29 percent complete, compared to the 50 percent that is typical for this time of year. French barley plantings lag their typical pace by 10 percent. Fieldwork is expected to accelerate this week as dry conditions return to the region. Despite the heavy rain in parts of western Europe, eastern Europe is suffering from the opposite issue. Dry conditions through August and September are hampering rapeseed plantings, leaving expectations that EU rapeseed area is expected to decrease for next year’s crop. The EU’s crop monitoring unit MARS sai...
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...
Key Market Insights Geopolitical Limbo: Geopolitical risk remained a key driver across global commodity markets today. President Trump stated that the Iran memorandum of understanding is not yet final and warned that military action could resume if negotiations fail. Both sides continue w...
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.