WPI previously wrote about the Trump USDA’s plans to weigh in on the farm bill as well as the diminishing likelihood of that occurring with the delay in confirmation of Sonny Perdue as its secretary (see Ag Perspectives, 10 March 2017). On Wednesday of this week, however, Secretary Perdue made good on the administration’s promise by releasing a set of guiding principles for the upcoming farm bill. Last year House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway (R-Texas) was very cool to administration suggestions on the farm bill and noted in comments at the 2017 Commodity Classic, "We all have our equities, and we are all jealous of our equities, and one of the equities of the legislative branch is to write the law." At the time...
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.