USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack today testified on the state of the rural economy before the House Agriculture Committee. Much of the testimony was on emergency and relief actions provided by USDA during the historic drought of 2012; however, Vilsack did also press for a comprehensive farm bill -- which he called a food, farms and jobs bill -- to be passed this year.Of course, the job of producing a farm bill became more difficult since the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on 1 March released an updated cost estimate of the Senate-passed and House Agriculture Committee farm bills. According to a letter to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Debbi Stabenow (D-Michigan), the "reduction to (baseline spending) would be significantly smaller tha...
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...
Markets are getting into the Halloween spirit, handing out more tricks than treats. There has been some encouraging news, but it hasn’t been enough to slow the broader slide. Now buyers need to show up with something other than another “Charlie Brown” rock for the bag. Somethi...
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.