Forty percent of the U.S. annual corn production now goes directly into ethanol production. As the world is fully aware, this is a massive number that has changed the face of the world corn and feed grains balance sheets to a degree never before witnessed. Mandates and subsidies certainly elevated this demand much more rapidly than imagined when the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) was first implemented. Ethanol production margins were so big in the early stages of the industry that more plants were built and came on line in a very short period of time than anyone predicted. That was followed be the global financial collapse in 2008 that sent between 30-40 percent of the ethanol industry into bankruptcy. The industry has since rationalized...
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.