The question for today is: to what extent has the GM revolution in corn and soybeans resulted in yield increases?John Baize had an interesting piece last week on the dramatic growth in world demand for soybeans, led of course by China. The rise in soybean production has been equally impressive, driven primarily by dramatic increases in planted acreage in Brazil. Mr. Baize talked about what will have to happen in acres and yields to keep up with the anticipated demand growth. The expansion in soybean demand has been the lead story for some time, but demand for feed grains and wheat also continues to grow. It should also be noted that world consumption has risen steadily despite the economic or political environments. We suspect that will con...
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.