The biofuel reform process in Congress has begun. The House Energy and Commerce Committee announced that it will publish a series of five white papers on Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) reform. The committee will issue questions for each paper, circulate them widely among all stakeholders and provide and provide a 60-day comment period. From the responses, the committee staff will produce a white paper that will try to define the key issues.The first such paper will be on the blend wall and questions for it already have been issued. The other four topics have not yet been released yet. This approach was adopted from Chairman John Dingle's (D-Michigan) process on greenhouse gas emission issues several years ago.A brief summary of the questio...
What You Need to Know Today: Cattle futures extended their sharp selloff Friday as weakening cash cattle prices, deteriorating feedlot profitability, and reduced packer demand continued to weigh on the market. The inability of futures to sustain a rally following last week's bullish Cattle on...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
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.