Much of the Senate's budget, which will likely be released this evening or tomorrow morning before a 2:30 pm (EDT) markup, will be focused on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other health programs.The Senate Budget Committee begins its markup of the FY 2016 budget tomorrow with a number of Agriculture Committee issues on the front burner. Those include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), crop insurance and, potentially, Title I farm income support programs. As we wrote on 13 March, the spending under the new farm programs increases dramatically in 2017 to about $8 billion overall, which is more than $3 billion in excess of the old direct payment program that was eliminated. Had it been continued, corn, soybeans and...
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...
Key Takeaways: Expected growth in U.S. soybean crushing capacity and output, driven by biofuel demand, will increase domestic soymeal supplies, with production growth significantly outpacing demand. WPI forecasts soymeal production increasing from 65.8 million short tons in 2026/27 to 70.5 mil...
Russian Grain Markets: 19–23 October 2026 The Russian grain market continued its recovery during the week, although prices remained volatile across regions. Wheat was notably bullish, while feed barley and corn were slower to appreciate, primarily because of weaker export demand amid logi...
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.