We are on the downhill slope of an unprecedented corn harvest. When the final tally is done, the U.S. corn crop of 2013/14 will be record large, exceeding the old record by hundreds of millions of bushels. It is even possible that despite reducing its harvested acreage number in next week's WASDE, USDA will still come up with an estimate of 14 billion bushels of U.S. corn production. There will be no record-setting drama attached to the soybean production estimate, but it should still be a big crop Something between 3.2-3.3 billion bushels would not surprise. After dealing with a few years of relatively small production lined up against strong demand, markets might view the big fall crops of 2013 as a novelty.However, demand for U.S...
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.