On Friday as part of the daily White House COVID19 briefing, Secretary Perdue announced the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP). It will come in two parts; the first will be direct payments to producers totaling $19 billion. The second will be a $3 billion commodity purchase program. USDA will be holding a series of stakeholder conference call briefings today for each sector, and tomorrow will hold a teleconference on the purchase program. Direct Payments: $16 billion in direct payments for farmers and ranchers, which will come from the $9.5 billion emergency program included in the CARES Act and $6.5 billion in remaining Credit Commodity Corporation (CCC) funding. This will fully deplete the CCC until July when $14 bil...
What You Need to Know Today: Attacks between the U.S. and Iran intensified overnight and the U.S. Central Command reported that the U.S. naval blockade against Iran will begin at 3:00 PM CDT Tuesday. President Trump said the Strait of Hormuz is open to all shipping traffic, except Iran. In an...
Beef packer margins improved to -$172/head last week, up $31 from the prior week as sharply lower fed cattle prices more than offset a seasonal decline in the Choice cutout. The cutout fell to $382/cwt while fed cattle prices dropped to $248/cwt, allowing packers to recover some of the margin c...
Key Takeaways: Aquaculture is becoming increasingly important in meeting global seafood demand, gaining market share as wild-caught fisheries face production limitations. Superior feed conversion efficiency gives aquaculture a competitive advantage over traditional livestock production, with l...
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.