Concentrated but Explainable In President Biden’s first six months as president he issued an Executive Order calling on federal agencies to investigate economic consolidation that is harming workers and consumers. A new USDA/ERS presentation on Concentration and Competition in U.S. Agribusiness looks at three subsectors and while it finds concentration, it does not label it harmful. Researchers looked at the crop seed industry, meatpacking and food retailing. Meatpacking for beef became concentrated back in the 1980’s, hogs took longer and poultry hasn’t changed much. Larger plants achieve economies of scale and there was no change in the farm to wholesale price spread until 2016 forward. Notably, that development...
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
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.