This past Friday afternoon, USDA announced the third invitation round of the Feedstock Flexibility Program (FFP) to convert federally-held sugar into ethanol. Ethanol mills must bid by 20 November. Offers must be submitted for each lot in its entirety with a price expressed in U.S. dollars per pound that can be up to four decimal places. No bids will be accepted on partial lots. Lot sizes range from 20 million-135 million pounds. There are 503 million pounds of refined beet sugar and 90 million pounds of raw cane sugar for a total of 593 million pounds. That equates to about 42 million gallons of ethanol.Under the FFP, ethanol mills must take title to the sugar within 30 days. The sugar offerer is responsible for storage costs starting 1...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
Key Takeaways: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.