Today’s trade was essentially a reversal of recent trends with wheat higher, soybeans flat and corn rising above $3.50/bushel. The cattle complex was sharply higher as buyer activity picked up on cash market transactions and technical buying. After their bearish key reversal on the chart yesterday, both the Dow and S&P 500 stock indexes turned higher today with each up 1 percent as of this writing. The CBOE VIX Index has remained elevated and not trading below 11.18 today, the first time such a feat has occurred this year. COMEX gold futures are mixed with the January and March contracts higher as the February and April contracts moved lower on spreading activity. The U.S. Dollar Index is 7.5 points lower at 90.391, which has bee...
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.