The Northern Hemisphere growing season of 2014 will have to rank as one of the calmest, most boring in a very long time, and an El Nino pattern had been expected to be firmly in place by now that could eventually cause some weather trauma to Southern Hemisphere crops.The Northern Hemisphere growing season of 2014 will have to rank as one of the calmest, most boring in a very long time. So far, there hasn't been one credible weather scare or a day that markets tried to price in some sort of weather event that might lead to concerns about yields. Today we begin August, the month the soybean crop is made or not made. Prices were weak overnight because August has arrived and there is still no weather problem in sight. Cool weather has masked so...
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.