Whether one considers them to be investors or speculators, managed funds have collectively taken a real beating in the grain and soy markets during the last two months. They have been carrying large positions on the wrong side of the recent whiplash market action.Early in our grain business career, we gained considerable respect for futures market speculators. During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government sought to support high domestic crop prices with little regard for fundamentals of supply and demand. Unsurprisingly, this encouraged excess production of wheat, corn and other feed grains. The result was that USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) acquired huge stocks of grain. Creative programs for disposing of government stocks usu...
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.