There is now probably not much to be said about yesterday's USDA stock and acreage reports that is new. However, there are a few things gleaned from them that stand out and perhaps deserve a second look.Before yesterday's USDA stocks and acreage reports, the trade's consensus expectations seemed to be that except for old crop soybeans, the reports would be mildly bearish. The trade seemed to expect, or perhaps hope is a better word, that the 1 June soybean stocks would be small enough to reenergize old crop soybean bulls and recharge the August/November soybean spread. For our part, we expected that the combined reports would be mildly bearish, including for old crop soybeans. On balance, however, they were not just mildly bearish. When com...
Key Takeaways: Milk alone has not covered the full economic cost in any year since 2021: milk revenue fell short by $4.50, $2.15, $6.50, $1.27 and $2.34 per hundredweight in 2021 through 2025. Calf and cattle prices decided whether dairies cleared cost: cattle and other income lifted total rev...
Key Takeaways: Dry bulk markets are mixed with Capesize rates seeing solid gains while Panamax values slipped on a growing tonnage list. Supramax and Handysize vessels were stronger, though all sectors remain vulnerable to the seasonal dip in rates through Q4 and into Q1. Falling water l...
What You Need to Know Today: The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady at 3.75 to 4.0 percent Wednesday, with two officials dissenting in favor of a 25-basis-point increase. The Fed upgraded its assessment of economic growth from "solid" to "strong" but adopted a more patient approa...
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.