The current mood of grain and soy futures markets seems mainly unaffected by details of planting progress and beneficial weather as today’s price action demonstrates. Trading is dominated by technical charts and momentum signals that were set in motion several weeks ago. General Comments As of 15 May, the U.S. corn crop was 75 percent in the ground and U.S. soybeans were 36 percent planted, both of which were slightly above average for the date. After some early week showers, the Corn Belt will turn drier and warmer for the next several days, which should allow for further progress. Next Monday’s weekly report from USDA should show corn planting near 90 percent and soy planting at 60 percent or higher. With no signs of pending adverse wea...
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.