Today was the big day for USDA Acreage and Grain Stocks reports, and "big" was the operative word for acreage. Corn, soybeans and wheat were all up, with corn and soybeans at record levels. Cotton made up the difference with a drop of 17 percent from last year. Program crop acres were generally down in the primary production states, while planting was up outside of the Midwest. This puts a new focus on weather and crop progress as it relates to yields, which are less robust in many states with additional acres. Corn Corn acres came in far above analysts' expectations with the corn planted area for all purposes at 97.4 million acres, which is the highest number of planted acres since 1936. This is a 2 percent increase from 2012, with pro...
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.