Today are the Iowa caucuses for the Democratic presidential primary. Since 1972, Iowans have been the first state to weigh in on the presidential nominees through a series of 1,600 precinct level caucuses aggregated into state-wide results. Winning or doing well is often seen as a way to position a candidate for coming primaries. But the bottom line is, since the caucuses have been in existence, only three winners have become president (Jimmy Carter 1976, George W Bush 2000, Barrack Obama 2008). Over the years, there have been 10 Democratic caucuses, and the winner has been the party nominee seven times; there have been eight Republican caucuses and the winner has become the nominee only three times. In 2008, Republican eventual nominee Jo...
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.