Lean hog futures surged to new contract highs over the past several weeks, followed by a correction in values that remains ongoing. Despite strong pork demand and reduced slaughter volumes and carcass weights, traders have been wary of the seasonal trend for prices to pull back in Q3 and Q4. WPI’s latest analysis of pork and hog demand indicates these concerns are well founded, and our models project continued weakness in the pork sector. Notably, values will remain near or slightly below 2024 levels for the pork cutout and CME futures, while physical hog prices are expected to see modest year-over-year gains. For 2026, however, early projections suggest producers will again experience strong pricing and profitability in the first hal...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
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.