I remember way back in October when I saw an email from my department at Iowa State University about a Marketing-Communications Internship with Decision Innovation Solutions. I was immediately intrigued and thought to myself, this sounds like the perfect position for me! I was definitely correct and am very happy and grateful that DIS offered me the position back in November.
In this month's report, we look at the ethanol crush spread. Ethanol crush spread is a dollar value calculated as the difference between the combined sales values of ethanol, distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) and corn distillers oil (CDO) and the cost of corn in producing ethanol.
Within the past twenty years, the flow of information has exponentially increased, largely due to advancements in technology and adoption of social media. The speed at which issues are first manifested to when they are noticed on a large scale has increased.
Farmers face challenging market prices in 2019 and diminished (or negative) returns due to costs of production that are not decreasing as rapidly as the projected Iowa crop values this year.
It has been quite wet across a wide swath of the US corn production area this year. Planting progress has been slowed by relatively frequent and relatively heavy rains throughout April and May. Combined with cooler than normal weather in April and May and flooding along a number of rivers in the Midwest, it has been difficult, to say the least, to get corn planted.
Iowa is the number two soybean producer in the country after Illinois. In 2018/19 Iowa produced 565 million bushels of soybeans, which was about 12.4 percent of U.S. soybean production (4.544 billion bushels). U.S. soybean production is mainly destined for crush plants in the domestic market or for exports.
Worldwide, the per capita consumption of fish is increasing. Some of that increase is due to population growth and some growth is due to rising incomes.
In this short article, we look at pure biodiesel production for 2019. Pure or traditional biodiesel is known as Fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME). Renewable diesel (also known as Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil or HVO) and FAME often are confused.
Until this marketing year, China had been the main foreign market for U.S. soybeans. However, Brazil has taken the lead as China's main soybean trading partner. The United States percent share of China's total imports increased from 22.1 percent in 2012/13 marketing year (MY) to 36.8 percent in 2016/17, however the share declined to 28.7 percent in 2017/18.
