Livestock Shedding Pounds? Hog producers have been caught in a whipsaw of low hog prices due to tariffs, a dramatic rally (given the African swine fever situation in China that has since ebbed), and now rising feed costs due to the uncertain planting situation. In short, corn prices are likely to put a squeeze on hog producers, and market weight is one of the variables that is most under feeders’ control in the short run. Slaughter weights are still running at 287 pounds. Given a projected increase of 4.4 percent in pork production for the second half of 2019, an across-the-board drop of 4 pounds in average slaughter weight could reduce supplies by about 1.4 percent by bringing production down to about 13.74 billion pounds for that...
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.