At one time, Chicago wheat futures (now the CME wheat contracts) provided a price discovery function for most world buyers and sellers. However, the CME SRW wheat futures have never been a logical hedge for the great majority of world wheat trade.The business of buying and selling grains, oilseeds and oilseed products around the world is fraught with risks for producers, exporters, importers and end users alike. Among them are: changing ocean freight costs as that market responds to the pressures of supply and demand; fluctuating exchange rates when grain and oilseeds are purchased in one currency and then sold in another; the changing value of money as expressed by fluctuating interest rates; and of course the possibility that the quality...
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.