Lower volume and minimal price changes were featured during the overnight session, which is using the word feature very loosely. Winter wheat futures were up less than 2 cents, corn was about unchanged, and soybeans were down a penny. CME’s final count of corn open interest (O/I) from Wednesday showed a gain of nearly 9,000 contracts, bringing the increase for the first three days of the week to about 46,000 contracts. Total corn O/I now exceeds 1.7 million contracts, the highest volume in several years. Funds are no doubt on at least part of the short side. The question is if funds are not short covering, who is buying corn futures? The sheer cheapness of corn futures prices may have enticed some buying from index funds, but that is...
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.