Arbitrage White Members of Mexico’s National Tortilla Council were reportedly (Reuters) threatening to raise the price of their primary product, a staple food in the Mexican diet, by 20 percent. They claimed higher prices for corn and fuel were squeezing them out of any profit. The government’s economy ministry officials promised to help contain high costs and thus avoid public perceptions of inflation in an election year. Presumably, the plan involves importing more white corn. In a separae report, Reuters notes that too many farmers in the U.S. (predominantly Illinois, Kentucky and Nebraska) switched to growing white corn in 2017, and the result is a glut of product. That variety is now uniquely selling on par with pedestria...
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.