Smaller Cattle Herd Tomorrow the USDA will release its twice-per-year Cattle Inventory report – issued in January and July. Last year’s initial report was about a month late due to the government shutdown but showed that all cattle and calves in the U.S. as of 1 January 2019 totaled 94.8 million head, slightly above the 94.3 million head on 1 January 2018. Tomorrow’s report will almost certainly show a reduction in the cattle herd, which has been expanding since 2014. High feed prices from 2007 - 2013 lead to herd reduction and the 1 January 2014 report was the lowest point for the beginning of the year cattle inventory since 1951. Our estimate is that the inventory will be close to the 2017 level...
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.