Milling Wheat The wheat market in the Black Sea is extremely quiet. The major Mediterranean and Middle Eastern destinations seem to be well covered for February and probably even for March. Russian and Ukrainian wheat was much cheaper than EU and U.S. wheat in November and December. Most of the importers/consumers have secured a few months' worth of forward consumption in anticipation of higher market prices after the supplies from Russia and Ukraine are exhausted. Today, these long positions are threatened by the sharp collapse of the U.S. wheat price and the fall (to a lesser extent) of the French wheat price. As a result, importers generally are not keen to buy additional volume before they liquidate their "expensive" wheat stocks. Lo...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.