As they begin planning for 2016, many producers are now thinking the big bull market might have been the worst thing to happen to production agriculture.2016 started on a sour note today for farmers. The March corn and wheat futures contracts put in new lows, and the March soybean futures contract dropped to within 8-9 cents of the contract low. 2015 was a terrible year for U.S. farmers as prices continued to collapse. The only good news was that great yields cushioned some of the pain of low prices. It would have been a complete disaster otherwise. Of course there were those pockets of weak yields that didn’t fare very well. The chart below is the latest USDA/ERS forecast for net farm income, which also isn’t pretty:We are starting to rece...
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.