The recent BRICS+ meeting in South Africa highlighted some of the animosity toward a world order long dominated by countries comprising just a minority of the world’s population. However, the Western model is difficult to undo for many reasons. From the standpoint of its architects, it provides certainty (rule of law), financial incentive (free markets), and a moral code (democracy/human rights). For its opponents, it is just difficult to break historical inertia. An alternative approach just needs to build critical mass to the point it reaches a tipping point. There is a practical component that is very difficult to break – the dominance of the English language. It is not even the primary language for two-thirds of its speaker...
What You Need to Know: U.S. fertilizer production is highly concentrated, but concentration alone does not establish that producers are operating as a cartel. Imports introduce competition unevenly: they supply nearly all U.S. potash consumption but play much smaller roles in domestic ammonia...
Key Takeaways: Managed money is holding more than one million net-long contracts across agricultural markets, with corn, soybeans, and soymeal all reaching record net-long positions in September. Fundamental concerns surrounding yields, supplies, and global availability have helped justify the...
What You Need to Know: H-2A has become a principal agricultural labor channel: certifications increased from fewer than 117,000 in 2014 to 398,258 in 2025 and continued to rise in 2026. The proposed Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act (SAWA) would open H-2A to year-round operations and...
Key Takeaways: USDA data access is equal; the ability to use it is not. Larger operations can afford experts who turn public reports into business decisions. Analytical capacity is the true advantage. Forecasts matter only when converted into profit, purchasing, and risk-management decisions...
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.