World Perspectives

Deep Bench to Fight RFK; China Market Risk; Thankless Job

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...

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May 26 Corn closed at $4.62/bushel, down $0.05 from yesterday's close.  May 26 Wheat closed at $6.05/bushel, up $0 from yesterday's close.  May 26 Soybeans closed at $11.5925/bushel, down $0.145 from yesterday's close.  May 26 Soymeal closed at $315.3/short ton, down $6.8 from ye...

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livestock

Grassley and Smith Introduce Meat Industry Consolidation Bill

Previously, on 24 March, WPI wrote about fertilizer consolidation and an effort by Majority Leader John Thune to introduce mandatory price reporting for fertilizer, similar to the process for meat and dairy. However, the efforts to address concentration and market transparency continue. More re...

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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.

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