After two hours of debate on the floor, the Senate today began voting on the 73 farm bill amendments. The following is an update as of 5 p.m. ET.The Grassley amendment passed with a striking majority. As we mentioned earlier today in the Special Report, there are several amendments on means-testing farm and conservation program payments. The Grassley vote is likely to set the standard for all the other means-testing type amendments for farm payments. Payment limits have been an issue in the 2002 and 2008 Farm Bills. The Bush Administration pushed hard for them but was unsuccessful. We see the high commodity prices, strong farm balance sheets and the huge federal deficit of the past four years as the impetus to change the political environme...
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.