Today's trading of corn contracts was primarily preparation for USDA's 12 August reports. There is far less interest among traders in trying to trigger technical price action than to be ready for the volatility that is approaching. General Comments Between late September 2014 and yearend, there was a rather uniform rally in corn, wheat and soymeal. The nearby corn contract rallied around $0.75 from its September low of about $3.64/bushel to a high of approximately $4.40/bushel. Increased demand was credited in part for this rebound, but that reasoning was not entirely accurate as USDA's estimates for 2014/15 U.S. corn ending stocks averaged over 2 billion bushels during this period, and corn contracts sold back off to the prior lows from...
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.