Farm Bill DeficienciesU.S. Senate Democrats have finally laid down their marker in a bicameral negotiation over a farm bill renewal. In it, Democrats conceded to a House Republican initiative to double spending on export promotion programs. However, they did not accept the Republican position that California’s Proposition 12, dictating the hog production methods for selling pork into the state, should be overruled. Indeed, the industry’s position is that farm law writers need to suppress the over-wrought approach of animal rights campaigners on many issues. However, their larger problem may be the Trojan Horse of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. possibly entering the government. All the more reason for the agrifood lobby to get a farm bill with some...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
WPI recently completed an expansion of our methodology for estimating and forecasting U.S. and global soybean crushing margins. The new approach incorporates the energy market’s expanding influence on the oilseed sector and the structural changes in global biofuel demand. This report is i...
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.