The acreage numbers used weren’t surprising. The talk over most of the winter has been that U.S. farmers want to plant more corn. There might be some external factors, though, that hold corn acres closer to unchanged from 2015 than up 2 million acres.Thank goodness for the USDA’s Outlook Forum this week as it provided some fresh numbers to look at, discuss and write about even though the outcome was well anticipated by the trade. Market analysts are desperately waiting for the end of winter around the Northern Hemisphere in the hope that something will bring any level of excitement back to the markets. There was nothing in yesterday’s supply/demand projections to indicate that might happen any time soon. The yield estimates used on the supp...
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.