For the past two days, the House Ag Committee Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management has held hearings on Title I of the farm bill. A total of 18 witnesses testified before the committee. Some of the highlights from major commodity groups include:National Association of Corn Growers (NCGA): Crop insurance is the most fundamental risk management tool, but it is not designed to address price-induced declines in revenue that could last several years. NCGA is proposing four reforms to a revenue assurance program under Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE): Set the revenue benchmark at the Crop Reporting District to better address area-wide, disaster-related production losses closer to the farm. Use a simple five-year Ol...
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...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
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.