By the end of this month, USDA will have to decide whether to hold a public hearing on the Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO). This would be the first hearing in more than a decade. As WPI reported back in March, changes to the FMMO are a good bet given the impact of COVID on the dairy market, especially in light of an FMMO change in the 2018 farm bill (more below). Producer groups, primarily the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), have been working on dairy program reforms for a couple of years now and in May, WPI summarized the proposed reforms to the FMMO submitted to USDA by NMPF with AFBF’s support. Since then, the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the Wiscons...
What You Need to Know Today: Crude oil prices extended their rally today, supported by several developments, including escalating Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure and growing concerns about supply disruptions. The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to remove 50 perc...
Key Takeaways: The agricultural trade surplus has become a sizable deficit: the balance swung from a $40.1 billion surplus in 2011 to a $40.7 billion deficit in 2025. Imports kept growing while exports lost momentum: between 2020 and 2025, agricultural imports increased 45 percent, compa...
USDA released its October Cattle on Feed report Friday, showing 11.4 million cattle in feedlots with capacity for 1,000 head or more, slightly below last year. September placements were the lowest for the month since records began in 1996, marking the third consecutive month of placements sett...
Total Red Meat & Poultry September 2026 total red meat and poultry stocks totaled 1.97 billion pounds, down 1.4 percent from August despite typically increasing 0.8 percent during the month, and were 1.5 percent below September 2025 levels. The decline pushed total inventories to a new five...
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.