There were modest volumes on this last trading day of the week, except in soymeal and cattle where the goal was to get out of the former and into the latter. There were new contract highs, again, in cattle. Overall weakness was blamed on Argentina’s announced lower tax rates on commodity...
As Gary Blumenthal reported yesterday, the Senate Agriculture Committee held a confirmation hearing on the nomination of Brooke Rollins to be Secretary of USDA. As Gary noted, she “rolled” through the hearings “poised, confident, charming” and had done the groundwork as...
TikTok is still operating but the tick tock on South American will eventually run out of time. Notable developments today included a lower open, but still plenty of strength. Corn remains up about a nickel for the week, beans up more than 30-cents and while wheat dipped today, the large gains l...
Rollins Rolled Poised, confident, charming - USDA Secretary-Designate Brooke Rollins hit the trifecta today at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee. She mostly just needed to show that she supported U.S. agriculture. After all, Donald Trump won over 98 percent of the...
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.