Christmas and New Year’s Day fell on a weekend this year, and a deep freeze fell on much of the country over the holidays, all of it impacting the slaughter totals at the end of the year. Labor schedules over the holidays were a factor, so was cold weather, which further impacted delivery of cattle as the supply dropped. The table below shows the impact of the drought, and the effect it had on herd liquidation throughout 2022. The December Cattle on Feed report showed 11.7 million head on feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity; that was 97 percent of last December, which also saw the largest number of December placements on record. Historically, looking at the data, the December 2022 inventory would...
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.