The demand for higher grade beef has been driving up cattle prices. Meanwhile, more countries are joining the U.S. regarding its concern about Canada’s new dairy policy. Record Choice Select Spread Cattle futures prices have mostly stabilized this week as cash prices trend bullish. Last year cattle feeders suffered large amounts of red ink, and that led to lenders insisting on more risk coverage, which helped buoy futures prices. Now with strong demand for beef, packers are finding that fewer cattle have been grading Choice. As a result, they are willing to spend more freely for higher quality grading animals, which is helping to boost live cattle prices and feeder margins. The Choice-Select spread is now at record levels, and the Choice...
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.