Last week, three Iowa Members of the House of Representatives – Representatives Cindy Axne, Abby Finkenauer and Dave Loebsack, all Democrats – introduced a companion bill to legislation introduced by Iowa’s Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst that would require packers to buy 50 percent of all cattle from the spot cash market to be delivered within 14 days (the so-called 50/14 bill). The current national average of cash market transactions is between 20 to 25 percent of cattle marketed, though it varies in different parts of the country. By definition, the 50/14 rule would reduce other forms of procuring cattle, including forward contracts, various formula-based contracts, and grid pricing which applies prem...
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.