The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its estimates of projected spending under the proposed Senate farm bill. According to CBO, enacting the bill "would bring total direct spending for those USDA programs to $969 billion" during the 2013-22 period, $23.6 billion less than would be spent under the current law.Additionally, the CBO projected that the bill would "authorize appropriations over the 2013/17 period for existing and new USDA programs," costing about $28 billion over the next five years.But with Congress moving into the second half of the legislative year, no budget in the Senate and a debt ceiling increase necessary this year, the budget beyond the farm bill is poised to take center stage this summer. Currently, forces ar...
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: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
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.