It has been a strange 12 months for the soybean complex to say the least. The drought in Brazil and Argentina that stretched from December 2011 through February 2012 so sharply reduced soybean production that they were all but eliminated as a source of soybeans to China and the rest of the world market from June forward. World demand shifted to the U.S. as the only significant remaining source of soybeans. When the U.S. summer drought came along to threaten the soybean crop, soybean prices augured nearly straight up, followed more erratically by prices of soy products. Nevertheless, export demand principally from China remained strong, and the U.S. soybean supply and demand balance became very tight.In the market furor over soybeans and t...
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...
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.