The railroads report that they are working on solutions to the rail backup problem for the fall grain harvest season, and BNSF projects that it is on track to have eliminated past due deliveries by mid-September. The issue is not isolated to railcars, however.Rail backups were wreaking havoc this year on the ethanol sector, pushing prices up on the coasts and down in the Midwest near production facilities. Now we're seeing some of the same issues with regard to grains. The Department of Transportation's Surface Transportation Board (the Board) requested that BNSF Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway disclose their plans for resolving the backlog of grain car orders as well as begin providing weekly progress reports. The weekly reports were...
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.