General Comments The U.S. government, including USDA, reopened today following the passage of the interim legislation to temporarily fund the government and provide borrowing authority that was immediately signed by President Obama last night. USDA quickly announced that it was canceling the October WASDE, October Cattle on Feed Report and October Cotton Gin Report. The November WASDE to be released on 8 November will provide the next USDA corn and soybean yield and production estimates and supply/demand updates. Meanwhile, USDA's AMS has started to provide its usual daily reports on local livestock markets, local grain bids, etc.It is unclear how and when USDA will organize and release export sales reports that catch up with activity...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
Key Takeaways: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
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.