Farm Bill Issues: There are at least two issues bubbling up amidst the effort to reauthorize the U.S. farm bill: BOBSAT and dairy. With farmland values rising and crop production highly valuable, U.S. government determinations under the so-called "Swampbuster" rule, which governs the conversion of prior wetlands to crops, reportedly are "really heating up." If it boils over, the issue could get reopened in a 2013 farm bill. One description of how the government makes its determinations is "BOBSAT," or Bunch of Biologists Sitting Around a Table.The ability to move a farm bill in the House gets down to placating House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on dairy. He strongly opposes the effort by dairy farmers to use supply controls in order to b...
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.