Yesterday, WPI presented our initial acreage forecasts for the 2026 U.S. crop year with a focus on the major crops (corn, soybeans, and all-wheat). Today, we extend that analysis to show our forecasts for more minor crop acres. Briefly, our modeling results show that producers across the U.S. are still expected to pare back planted area for minor crops amid low farm profitability. One might have expected a larger switch from the “big three” (corn, soybeans, and wheat) into specialty crops, but our current models show the economic incentives lie either in CRP land or crops not currently modeled. For background (and as we noted Thursday), WPI has recently completed a set of sweeping updates to our U.S. crop acreage forecasti...
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.