AI and Ag Public policy on artificial intelligence is a tricky topic. On the one hand, policymakers are trying to avoid their worst fears about its potential impacts, at the same time there is a geopolitical Cold War level race for data dominance. An overly precautionary approach would kill the goose about to lay golden eggs. Moreover, recalling the economic benefits from when the U.S. heavily regulated online sports betting, there are plenty of rogue nations ready to offer up the laissez-faire approach to AI. The internet has been about the network, whereas AI is about the production of bytes. Productivity gains in many sectors including agriculture are in the offing if it isn’t overly throttled by the paranoid. Currency Conc...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
From WPI Consulting
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.