Macroeconomics Food Inflation Sees First Uptick Since May After five consecutive months of declines, food prices in the aggregate rose by 1.6 percent on an annual basis in November. The primary drivers of the increase were fresh vegetables and eggs, which saw their average prices rise by 30.6 percent and 17.6 percent from a year ago. Meanwhile, the prices of fresh fruit and cooking oil advanced by 4.1 percent and 7.2 percent from their November 2020 averages. Pork prices, however, continued to slide, even with the rebound in live hog prices in November. Compared with a year ago, the average retail cost of pork fell by 32.7 percent, although that was substantially smaller than the 44 percent annualized decrease in October. Apa...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices extended their rally today, supported by several developments, including escalating Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure and growing concerns about supply disruptions. The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to remove 50 perc...
USDA released its October Cattle on Feed report Friday, showing 11.4 million cattle in feedlots with capacity for 1,000 head or more, slightly below last year. September placements were the lowest for the month since records began in 1996, marking the third consecutive month of placements sett...
Regional News Dry weather across the UK and Europe is becoming increasingly concerning for the 2027 crops as planting intentions are lowered amid dry soil conditions. Delayed sowing or establishment under adverse conditions could leave crops more vulnerable to frost/freeze events and dise...
Total Red Meat & Poultry September 2026 total red meat and poultry stocks totaled 1.97 billion pounds, down 1.4 percent from August despite typically increasing 0.8 percent during the month, and were 1.5 percent below September 2025 levels. The decline pushed total inventories to a new five...
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.