Markets opened steady to higher Thursday evening and then strengthened at today’s opening. They found some short covering to end the week, but there was little fresh news. What news there was seemed to center on the growing size of the fund short in corn futures as well as wheat futures. The problem of course is that there still isn’t a trigger to cause any significant short covering by these funds. They are now estimated to be short 250,000 contracts of corn and 125,000 contracts of wheat while still holding a small net long of about 30,000 contracts of soybeans. There is some concern about extended forecasts showing weather turning drier in Argentina, but Brazil’s outlook looks good. A siege of very wet weather across e...
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.