The CBOT was mixed to end the week with wheat remaining under pressure from Ukraine’s slow but growing grain export program and from the large Russian crop. Corn managed to push higher for the day on a hot, dry weekend forecast for the Plains and western Corn Belt as well as a dry outlook for most of the U.S. next week. Soyoil futures rallied sharply but bear soyoil/soymeal spreading pushed the latter contract sharply lower and meal gave up most of Thursday’s gains. Despite the fireworks in soyoil, soybeans settled mostly lower as traders were generally reluctant to chase the market either way. The U.S. beef industry continues to show no sign of expansion amid drought in most of the western states and beef cow slaughter h...
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.