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: 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...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.