Tight Margins Prevent Disruption While populist politicians complain about corporate greed, the businesses with long term success in agriculture achieve their success via tight margins. Bloomberg notes that upstarts in the “agrifoodtech” space like Farmers Edge Inc. and Gro Intelligence failed to disrupt the sector like eBay, Uber and Amazon. That is because they contrasted the price of a bushel of wheat and the cost of a loaf of bread and mistakenly assumed some arbitrage opportunity. The upstarts reveal not just their ignorance of how the sector works but that of the investors that handed them billions of dollars to waste. Hungary Isn’t Hungry Hungary assumes the six-month rotating presidency of the EU in July and in...
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.