Markets started this week with a thud. Corn and wheat futures contracts reached new lows on Monday. Meanwhile, soybean futures have continued to trade in an extremely small trading range of $9.90-10.00 in the January contract. Markets have been better the past few days, which is not great for those with any bullish sentiment. However, it was enough to make some believe the lows in corn and wheat may have been temporary. Weather will decide the fate of soybean prices. Following are a few reasons why markets ended this week with an improved tone: • Weather in southern Brazil and much of Argentina’s key producing regions remains basically too dry. The extended forecasts for the next two weeks also look mostly dry. However, there w...
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.