World Perspectives

COVID-19 is a Reminder to Livestock and Meat Industry of the Role of Traceability

A friend of WPI’s and a former colleague to some of us, Hanns Kuttner is a health policy analyst and senior fellow at the prestigious Hudson Institute. He recently wrote an insightful piece about the COVID-19 related shutdown of Smithfield’s pork packing plant in Sioux Falls and the investigative team from the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that is on site. The key takeaway from Kuttner’s piece is: If the (CDC) team only looks inside the plant, it will miss the question that is most important for the rest of the meat industry: how did this begin?  As Kuttner points out: The investigation inside the plant will produce frustratingly-limited detail. The plant has been close...

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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.

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