After rising sharply in 2022, input costs remain stubbornly high yet today. At the same time, the prices received for major crops like corn, soybeans and wheat have fallen by as much as 30 percent over the same period. In response to these economic headwinds, Congress stepped up through the American Relief Act to provide financial relief through one-time economic assistance payments to farmers totaling $10 billion in addition to approximately $21 billion to help farmers recover from catastrophic natural disasters. Combined, more than $30 billion in ad hoc support is expected to be distributed to farmers and ranchers throughout 2025. Driven by this, and strong economic returns in the cattle sector where beef prices are up well ov...
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.
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...