USDA’s GIPSA rules have been released, as promised, before President Obama leaves office. The rules have 60-day comment periods, which will expire in February and leave the ultimate decision to a new USDA under the incoming Trump administration.Yesterday USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) released its rules on livestock marketing and contracting as required by the 2008 Farm Bill. They were released in three parts: an interim final rule and two proposed rules that were collectively known as The Farmer Fair Practices Rules.This matter has been particularly contentious since 2010 when GIPSA first proposed a rule under the language provided by the aforementioned farm bill. Many producer groups and most meat i...
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...
Beef packer margins plunged $105/head last week to $36/head as higher cattle prices combined with declining wholesale beef values to sharply compress packer profits. Fed cattle prices rose nearly $3/cwt to $227/cwt while the Choice cutout fell $4.75/cwt to $368/cwt. Margins have deteriorated $1...
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.