The House of Representatives is likely to take up both the ag appropriations bill and the FY 2018 budget resolution this week. What will that mean for agriculture programs?Congress will be returning from the Independence Day recess tomorrow with only 13 days in session before the August recess. According to the current schedule, there will then be 12 days in session during September prior to the end of the fiscal year on the 30th of that month. That leaves 25 days for Congress to get the nation’s fiscal house in order, which consists of finishing the FY 2018 appropriations bills and passing the FY 2018 budget. In that regard, this will be a busy week.Regarding appropriations, only three of the 12 bills have moved forward out of committee in...
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.