Grain traders from commodity fund managers to the big multinational agribusinesses have consistently complained about the lack of profitable trading opportunities during the past five years or so. Big crops and large stockpiles of corn, wheat and soybeans in both the U.S. and the world drove prices for those commodities to low levels and dampened price volatility despite record demand. U.S. trade disputes/disruptions with China and other countries have also reduced U.S. export volumes and trading opportunities. In addition to the lack of price volatility, grain traders and users have been frustrated by the growth of on-farm storage capacity that has allowed farmers in the U.S. and other major producing countries to retain their crop produc...
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.