House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway’s (R-Texas) top-to-bottom review of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), promised two years ago when he assumed that position, was released this month and will chart the farm bill debate over the program.When Representative Michael Conaway (R-Texas) became chairman of the House Agriculture Committee at the beginning of the 114th Congress, he promised a top-to-bottom review of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It has been an increasingly controversial topic since the 2014 Farm Bill, which started out to be the 2012 Farm Bill, largely because Congress has been quarreling about the program for nearly two years. Indeed, to get that last farm bill ultimatel...
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.