Congress made a number of significant changes to crop support programs with the Agricultural Act of 2014, and farmers must make a one-time enrollment choice that covers the life of the farm bill from crop years 2014-18.Farmers will now be faced with some decision-making with the Agricultural Act of 2014, the long-awaited successor to the 2008 Farm Bill, signed into law by President Obama on 7 February 2014. Congress made a number of significant changes to crop support programs, including the repeal of the Direct Payment Program, Counter Cyclical Payment Program and the Average Crop Revenue Election Program. These risk management tools are replaced by two new programs, Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC). Farmers mu...
Key Takeaways: Milk alone has not covered the full economic cost in any year since 2021: milk revenue fell short by $4.50, $2.15, $6.50, $1.27 and $2.34 per hundredweight in 2021 through 2025. Calf and cattle prices decided whether dairies cleared cost: cattle and other income lifted total rev...
Key Takeaways: Dry bulk markets are mixed with Capesize rates seeing solid gains while Panamax values slipped on a growing tonnage list. Supramax and Handysize vessels were stronger, though all sectors remain vulnerable to the seasonal dip in rates through Q4 and into Q1. Falling water l...
What You Need to Know Today: The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady at 3.75 to 4.0 percent Wednesday, with two officials dissenting in favor of a 25-basis-point increase. The Fed upgraded its assessment of economic growth from "solid" to "strong" but adopted a more patient approa...
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.