The ability to export crude oil, which was granted to U.S. producers in December 2015, is still a game changer in the energy markets. Global crude oil averaged $54/barrel in 2017, up $10/barrel from the previous year. That increase is fairly limited, however, given the 4.5 percent cut in production that members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) each agreed during the fourth quarter of 2016 to target. OPEC’s production averaged 32.5 million barrels/day in 2017, down 0.2 million barrels/day from the year before. Its members agreed on 30 November 2017 to extend the production cuts through the end of 2018, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is forecasting the average price for Brent crude will b...
What You Need to Know Today: A third U.S. border crossing (Columbus, New Mexico) has reopened to Mexican cattle imports following nearly two years of restrictions related to New World screwworm. The reopening could gradually improve feeder cattle availability, although more than 60 confi...
Yesterday, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released a new report of negotiated cash purchases of cattle under the mandatory price report. The report included Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. The goal of the report was to solve the confidentiality issues e...
Key Takeaways: U.S. soybean crushing began in 1911 and saw its most rapid expansion during the 1930s amid the broader agricultural and technology revolutions of the time. After peaking in the early 2000s, the soybean crushing industry went through a downturn as poor crush margins forced...
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.