USDA will release its quarterly stocks and final small grains production estimates at 11 AM (CDT) Monday, 30 September. We have commented on the quarterly stocks report a number of times over the last couple of weeks. This report is the estimate of total U.S. supplies, on and off farm, as of 1 September. Because the corn and soybean harvests are so late this season, the stocks report should be relatively clean. In other words, we won't have to interpolate how many bushels of 2013 production are included in the 1 September estimates as we did a year ago. These numbers will also become the ending stocks estimates for MY 2012/13 that ended 31 August.Old crop corn supplies were the first or second smallest on record, but the stocks number for...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
Key Takeaways: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
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.