The simple fact is that annual production and thus the annual renewability of grain and oilseed supplies allows for a quick production response to high prices. Generally, it takes a longer period of time for demand to grow in response to low prices.High prices (and good weather) are the best cure for high grain and oilseed prices, to paraphrase the old economic cliché, and the experience following 2012/13 offers vivid confirmation of this. Three years of record or near-record U.S./world crop production and growing stocks have buried those loudly-voiced fears of shortages and growing world hunger, which even at that time were overblown. Political critics of high crop prices, futures markets, lax regulation, excessive speculation, crops for b...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.