The Memorial Day weekend at the end of May is widely considered to be the beginning of summer even though that season’s solstice does not occur for at least another three weeks. As farmers, traders, processors, exporters and everyone else with vested interest in the production of major U.S. crops return from the holiday and look ahead, they always face the standard questions about weather, crop planting progress, crop conditions and what the future holds for market activity and price direction. Every year is different. There always seems to be a widely unique array of possible answers as well as market and price responses to those standard questions. After all, U.S. and other Northern Hemisphere crops have a full growing season appro...
What You Need to Know Today: President Trump suspended the planned attacks on Iran and announced that the pieces for a framework for peace were in place in a weekend social media post. Iran, however, later said no efforts were underway to conduct negotiations with the U.S., though Oman indicat...
Key Takeaways: E15 expansion would support corn and ethanol demand by increasing domestic biofuel consumption and reducing reliance on petroleum-based fuels. Year-round E15 has gained bipartisan momentum, but the policy remains in legislative limbo as lawmakers continue to negotiate provisions...
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.