As they begin planning for 2016, many producers are now thinking the big bull market might have been the worst thing to happen to production agriculture.2016 started on a sour note today for farmers. The March corn and wheat futures contracts put in new lows, and the March soybean futures contract dropped to within 8-9 cents of the contract low. 2015 was a terrible year for U.S. farmers as prices continued to collapse. The only good news was that great yields cushioned some of the pain of low prices. It would have been a complete disaster otherwise. Of course there were those pockets of weak yields that didn’t fare very well. The chart below is the latest USDA/ERS forecast for net farm income, which also isn’t pretty:We are starting to rece...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
Key Takeaways: India is excluding sugarcane juice, sugar syrup, and B-heavy molasses from its 2026/27 fuel ethanol procurement program to protect domestic sugar supplies, potentially shifting additional demand toward corn and rice. India’s corn consumption for ethanol has surged from jus...
Developer's Note 24 August 2026: WPI recently completed an exercise that updated the codebase for this app and solved some of the discrepancies between our five-year average calculation and USDA's. There are a few lingering cases where early (late) starts (finishes) to the crop cycle resu...
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.