Macro Trends 2017 Ag Output Up Despite Lagging Growth Rates Annual data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics shows the country’s total ag output was up year on year in 2017. Field crop production (including soybeans, wheat, corn, rice, beans, fruits and vegetables) increased 0.3 percent to 617.9 MMT from 616.05 MT in 2016. At the same time, total planted acreage fell 0.7 percent to 112.2 million hectares (277.25 million acres). Improved production efficiencies in corn and cotton pushed the average yield to 5.5 MT/hectare (13.59 MT/acre, up 1 percent from 2016. On the livestock front, output was fairly stagnant with the exception of beef production, which rose 1.3 percent to 7.26 MMT. Meanwhile, pork output was up...
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.