China has been purchasing significant volumes of corn at the same time it sits on the majority of the world’s surplus carryover of the grain. Its policy adjustment in recent years has brought its share of the global carryover down slightly but it still measures 61 percent. By contrast, the U.S. share of the surplus has risen from 16.5 percent to 22 percent of global corn stocks. China could be buying to fulfill its Phase One trade agreement commitments, or it could have smaller or more damaged corn stocks than publicly advertised. U.S. policy officials have told China that U.S. surplus stock building was a mistake in the 1980’s and they should learn from America’s painful experience. Yet, Washington looks to be repe...
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.