USDA Chief Economist Robert Johansson tried to identify the silver lining this week, saying that input costs would be lower and off-farm income would be higher as would U.S. domestic demand. However, some reactions painted most of that as wishful thinking.USDA’s 92nd annual Agricultural Outlook Forum continued its successful record of attracting several hundred participants from across the sector while covering more than 30 topical issues of importance to the industry. Secretary Tom Vilsack once again excelled at the moderator function in the open sequence of the conference. Some presenters were better than others, and some topics could be deemed more acute than others, but there was ample audience for all of it. Importantly, the current st...
What You Need to Know Today: A third U.S. border crossing (Columbus, New Mexico) has reopened to Mexican cattle imports following nearly two years of restrictions related to New World screwworm. The reopening could gradually improve feeder cattle availability, although more than 60 confi...
Yesterday, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released a new report of negotiated cash purchases of cattle under the mandatory price report. The report included Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. The goal of the report was to solve the confidentiality issues e...
Key Takeaways: U.S. soybean crushing began in 1911 and saw its most rapid expansion during the 1930s amid the broader agricultural and technology revolutions of the time. After peaking in the early 2000s, the soybean crushing industry went through a downturn as poor crush margins forced...
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.