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feed-grains wheat

Bear Market Impacts on Labor

U.S. farmers are hurting financially from commodity prices that have been falling for half a dozen years and now exaggerated by the trade war with China. However, the volume of surplus wheat, corn and soybean stocks has had little correlation with the amount of farm labor employed (see graph below). This is in part because of countercyclical price and income policies, and now the Market Facilitation Program payments. However, the same cannot be said for the labor historically engaged in pricing and exporting what the farmers produce. Not just lower prices but lower volumes being shipped has caused intermediaries to pare down their workers in order to reduce losses. Moreover, Chinese state-owned companies like Cofco are capturing more of th...

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Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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