TOP STORIES

Fairway Files For Chapter 11, Proposing Sale to Village Super Market

By Soma Biswas

Fairway Markets, the iconic New York City grocery chain, filed for bankruptcy protection with a proposal to sell its Manhattan stores to the Village Super Market Inc., a member of the Wakefern Food Corp. cooperative.

Village Super Market, which operates stores under the ShopRite and Gourmet Garage banners, is offering $70 million for Fairway's five New York supermarkets and its distribution center, Fairway Markets said on Thursday.

IBM, Yara Launch Data Platform for Sustainable Food Production

By Maitane Sardon

Information-technology company International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Norwegian chemical company Yara International ASA (YAR.OS) have launched a platform for farm-and-field data exchange in an effort to improve the efficiency, transparency and sustainability of food production, a significant driver of climate change.

The companies said Thursday that the Open Farm & Field Data Exchange platform will gather farm and field data and make it more accessible for those playing a role in meeting growing global food demand, including farmer associations, industry players, academia and nonprofits from the food-and-agriculture industry.

STORIES OF INTEREST

CFTC To Propose Position Limits Rule on Jan. 30 -- Market Talk

14:28 ET - The Commodity Futures Trading Commission plans to issue a long-delayed proposal next week to limit the ability of speculators to manipulate prices for energy, metals and agricultural commodities. The CFTC said it will propose a rule on so-called position limits for derivatives in an open meeting scheduled for Jan. 30. While details of the proposal haven't been made public, CFTC chairman Heath Tarbert outlined a couple of broad goals in an op-ed on the American Farm Bureau Federation's website this week. "First, the proposal is designed to ensure that any market participant with a genuine need to exceed position limits can do so," Tarbert wrote. "Second, the proposal will leverage the good work done by derivatives exchanges over the past 30 years administering their own position limits." (paul.kiernan@wsj.com)

China-US Deal Still Has Much to Address: Penny Pritzker -- Market Talk

1232 GMT - Though a phase-one deal between China and the U.S. has eased tensions at least this week, there is still a lot of work to do, says PSP Founder Penny Pritzker. Speaking with CNBC in an interview in Davos, the former U.S. secretary of commerce says the deal is not as far along as is being revealed to the public, and there are still many issues of importance that need to be covered. "We didn't make any structural changes [in the relationship], and it cost us around 10% of Wisconsin farmers," Pritzker says, referring to reports that 10% of dairy farmers may have gone out of business in 2019. "We went through a lot of pain to get here--but there's still a lot of work to do," she says (adriano.marchese@wsj.com)

FUTURES MARKETS

Cattle Closes at Lowest Level Since Halloween -- Market Talk

15:45 ET - Livestock futures on the CME end mixed with live cattle futures falling 2.1% to $1.24175 per pound, while lean hog futures rise 1.1% higher to 75.35 cents per pound. Today's decline brings cattle futures to its lowest close since Oct. 31, when the April contract closed down at $1.24 and breaks it out of the $1.26-$1.28 range that it's been locked in since early January. (kirk.maltais@wsj.com; @kirkmaltais)

CASH MARKETS

 
Estimated U.S. Pork Packer Margin Index - Jan 23 
 
All figures are on a per-head basis. 
 
Date     Standard Margin       Estimated margin 
         Operating Index         at vertically - 
                             integrated operations 
 
Jan 23       +$ 51.47            +$ 34.84 
Jan 22       +$ 49.99            +$ 34.34 
Jan 21       +$ 49.26            +$ 33.61 
 
 * Based on Iowa State University's latest estimated cost of production. 
A positive number indicates a processing margin above the cost of 
production of the animals. 
 
Beef-O-Meter 
This report compares the USDA's latest beef carcass composite 
values as a percentage of their respective year-ago prices. 
 
 
                                 Beef 
          For Today             Choice   99.1 
      (Percent of Year-Ago)     Select   99.6 
 
USDA Boxed Beef, Pork Reports 

Wholesale choice-grade beef prices Thursday rose 36 cents per hundred pounds, to $215.32, according to the USDA. Select-grade prices fell 82 cents per hundred pounds, to $211.20. The total load count was 119. Wholesale pork prices rose 23 cents, to $77.94 a hundred pounds, based on Omaha, Neb., price quotes.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 23, 2020 17:55 ET (22:55 GMT)

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