At last week's bilateral meeting with the U.S., Chinese President Xi Jinping said agriculture is a field where both countries would "expand mutually beneficial cooperation." However, it has not been so mutually beneficial to date. Shabenomics Shinzö Abe was just elected by the ruling LDP party to a second, three-year term as prime minister of Japan. He announced that his goal in the next term is to boost Japan's economic output 22 percent by 2020. That will require some inflation, which has thus far proven elusive. He also wants to increase the Japanese birth rate as well as institutionalize child and elder care. The latter would formalize into economic output data services that are already performed by family members. Most controver...
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.