Wheat Dry weather and a sweltering heat wave allowed for a rapid advance of the wheat harvest and an even earlier harvest date in the southern part of the agricultural area. Farmers harvested an additional 19 percent of the area last week, putting the total harvest at 42 percent completion. Yields are averaging just 1.9 MT/ha across the nation so far and there is a lot of heterogeneity. Some fields are yielding above expectations while many are below. In the Cordoba zone, yields are 30 percent below historical levels, while in the nucleus region they are up to 60 percent. Most crop estimates put the final production between 11 and 12 MMT, below USDA’s December WASDE forecast of 12.5 MMT. So far, the quality of the wheat is goo...
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.