According to the 31 March USDA Prospective Plantings report, U.S. farmers will use the least amount of land for producing wheat since record keeping began a century ago. In reality, the area planted to wheat has been in decline for many years, while yield improvements have paled in comparison to corn and soybeans. The critique was that wheat needed to adopt genetic modification or else continue to cede area to the more profitable corn and soybean rotations. Globally, the area planted to wheat has also been declining concurrently with improvements in yield. Much of the wheat land in the western part of the U.S. is too dry for corn and soybeans, leaving these landowners with very little other choice but to plant wheat, with sorghum a possibi...
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.