President-Elect Joe Biden has not yet named his nominee to become U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) but there are plenty of breadcrumbs that suggest the person will be: 1) conventional; and 2) likely a former Obama Administration official. That has been the pattern for his other economic policy selections like Janet Yellen at Treasury and possibly Brian Deese in the White House. The transition advisory team for USTR is headed by Jason Miller, a former economic advisor in the Obama/Biden White House. Other corporate or free trade-leaning members of that team outnumber the organized labor/trade skeptics involved. Some of the names mentioned for the position include former WTO judge and now Georgetown University law professor Jennifer Hillman,...
What You Need to Know Today: The Brazilian real surged to start the week after a surprise election result in which right-wing Flavio Bolsonaro won the first round of the election. The swing in the U.S. dollar/Brazilian real (USD/BRL) exchange rate caused soybeans to jump sharply higher in earl...
Key Takeaways: Harvest pressure is fundamentally a timing issue: supply arrives much faster than demand can adjust, creating temporary weakness that can occur across crops and regions. The intensity of that pressure depends less on crop size alone than on how quickly grain moves into the syste...
Pork packer margins closed out September as positive, marking an improvement in a challenging 2026. According to Sterling Marketing, for the week ending 26 September, pork packer margins were $6.98 per head, which is up from a loss of $0.13 the previous week, more than double the margin of $3.9...
From WPI Consulting
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.