Deep Bench to Fight RFKBeing the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture is usually a pretty good job. It involves doling out billions of dollars, the constituency is dominated by courteous country people, and controversies tend to be minor. The person serving the longest in any Cabinet position was James “Tama Jim” Wilson at USDA for 16 years. Current USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack will have served in the position for 12 years. Henry A. Wallace served as USDA chief for eight years before being elevated to Vice President. Officially, the position is mid-tier in the presidential line of succession. But it is technically oriented, and the weakest secretaries have been those ill-suited to the job. Per Dave Juday’s discussion of who might be the next US...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. equities declined sharply Thursday, reversing Wednesday’s post-election rally as investors continued selling technology stocks amid concerns that Democratic gains in the midterm elections could slow investment in artificial intelligence and data center d...
The Senate Agriculture Committee will undergo significant changes in the new Congress beginning in January 2027, including several major shifts in meat-producing states. The Democratic Party’s tsunami swept Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) out of office, and out of the seat once held by...
What dairy breakeven looks like with and without the beef-on-dairy boom To put a dollar value on that question, this analysis removes the calf check from the USDA ledger and examines how many of the last five years would have reached breakeven without it. Key Takeaways: Milk and other income a...
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.