Overnight trading was quiet with grains and soybeans holding small gains. The release of USDA’s acreage projections for 2016/17 gave markets something new to chew on during the day session. General Comments World financial markets seemed to achieve a better degree of stability today, although intra-day volatility remains a factor. European stocks traded higher on hopes that the European Central Bank (ECB) will enlarge its stimulus programs at its March meeting. U.S. stocks are seemingly joined at the hip with spot crude oil prices. That may not make a great deal of sense, but it has been the case for the past few weeks. Today NYMEX crude oil weakened to about $1.00 lower before rebounding on reports of more meetings among oil-producing co...
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.