ERS’s study on cost savings in U.S. apple production is a good look at an industry adjusting to scarcity in labor markets. Washington State is by far the top producer, and they have long depended on the H2-A visa program for workers—an estimated 50,000 annually--not only for harvest, but for all manner of field operations and processing procedures. One effort to reduce costs is to build trellised orchards that present a “fruiting wall”. In this system, ladders and baskets are replaced by a moving platform that travels (slowly) down evenly spaced rows of trees that are shaped carefully to form a veritable wall of fruiting limbs. Current research is devoted to the development of robotic harvest...
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.