U.S. organic production standards are emotive (not science) based and cheat the philosophy of “all natural” and still fall short of the yields achieved in conventional production systems. Prioritizing Resources WTO Director General Roberto Azevedo will once again corral key countries into a meeting in Geneva on September 15-16 to discuss moving forward on the 15 year-old Doha Round. Meanwhile, he complains that the organization lacks the resources to manage the increase in dispute settlement cases that are being filed by countries. The logical conclusion would be to stop wasting resources on the Doha negotiations and shift them toward the WTO’s more successful contribution of enforcing the laws already on the books. Non-replicable The o...
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.