World Perspectives

Breaking Eggs with Poor Math

Activists have been pressuring the Biden Administration to take more action against Big Ag. The latest is an attack on egg production. Opponents are blaming the spread of avian influenza (AI) and the high cost of eggs on what they claim is 110 billion eggs produced on just 347 farms. They assert that AI spreads because laying hens lack genetic diversity, and their population is too dense. But AI is being spread by wild flocks of birds, which are no doubt genetically diverse and more dispersed.  They claim that Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer, profited hugely in 2023 but that is cherry picking data. The company’s stock is up 3.4 percent year-to-date (YTD), but down 2.5 percent from its peak a month ago. Meanwhile, the S&P...

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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.

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