EU olive oil and U.S. oranges are each having a challenging year. Beyond that the similarities are few. The EU produces 60 percent of the world’s olive oil. At its peak, the U.S. produced around 12 percent of global oranges, but that is now down to 4.6 percent. Olive oil is a premium product in the essential vegetable oil food category. Oranges and their juice are a luxury product not quite essential for the diet. European olive production has been challenged by drought. Orange groves in Florida have been hit by greening disease, as has the much larger supplies in Brazil. Plus, Florida trees were damaged by Hurricane Ian and have high land costs. The price of olive oil is up 117 percent, orange juice futures have climbed 210 pe...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to discuss agriculture and non-tariff trade barriers ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington later this month, potentially opening the door to additional U.S. agricultural purchases or improved marke...
The U.S. will observe Labor Day on Monday, 7 September. U.S. markets and the WPI office will be closed that day. The next edition of Ag Perspectives will be published Tuesday, 8 September...
Key Takeaways: Drought and changes to the multi-year trend in cow slaughter and retention have the potential to dramatically alter beef trim supplies and pricing, and WPI specifically models three different drought scenarios for fall 2026. Based on our models, WPI expects 90 percent lean...
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.