The EPA announced on Friday that it denied 26 requests for “small refinery exemptions” (SREs) over the periods of 2016-2018 and 2021-2023. There are still two SRE petitions pending for the 2018 compliance year. SRE’s have been a contentious issue for several years. SREs are provided for under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) if small refineries (i.e., less than 75,000 barrels of crude oil per day) can prove compliance with the RVOs would subject them to disproportionate economic hardship. The original RFS made these exemptions automatic for small refiners through 2010, and then Congress extended that through 2012. After that, the refineries had to petition to receive an SRE and prove economic harm. There is no stat...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices extended their rally today, supported by several developments, including escalating Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure and growing concerns about supply disruptions. The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to remove 50 perc...
Key Takeaways: The agricultural trade surplus has become a sizable deficit: the balance swung from a $40.1 billion surplus in 2011 to a $40.7 billion deficit in 2025. Imports kept growing while exports lost momentum: between 2020 and 2025, agricultural imports increased 45 percent, compa...
USDA released its October Cattle on Feed report Friday, showing 11.4 million cattle in feedlots with capacity for 1,000 head or more, slightly below last year. September placements were the lowest for the month since records began in 1996, marking the third consecutive month of placements sett...
Total Red Meat & Poultry September 2026 total red meat and poultry stocks totaled 1.97 billion pounds, down 1.4 percent from August despite typically increasing 0.8 percent during the month, and were 1.5 percent below September 2025 levels. The decline pushed total inventories to a new five...
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.