Much of U.S. agriculture has been hyperventilating that Donald Trump is going to get into a trade war and the resulting trade retaliation is going to hurt. Yesterday the administration announced a positive development. Channeling Le Trump Europeans patted themselves on the back when populist nationalist Marine Le Pen was dismissed by French voters, but now their savior, Emmanuel Macron, has adopted Donald Trump-style protectionism. While his call for a “Buy European” campaign is not so new since that is the whole intent of policies like geographic indicators and country-of-origin labeling, it is a more blunt presentation of the goal. His demand for greater protection of strategic sectors from foreign investment is traditional French reaso...
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.