House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway (R-Texas) has floor time scheduled for the farm bill next week. A quick WPI canvass of Hill staff and commodity group lobbyists gives the odds of the bill actually being taken up at about 50/50. It all boils down to the vote count, which is going on now and has been all week. As of this morning, there were not the necessary 218 votes to pass the bill due to some Republican defections. Those renegades are mostly the conservative, budget-hawk, “Freedom Caucus” members, who total about 40. Assuming there are about 200 Republican votes, 18 Democrats (roughly 9 or 10 percent of that caucus) would need to break party lines. The more Republican votes that are lined up, therefore, th...
What You Need to Know Today: USDA reports are delayed until Tuesday due to the federal holiday on Monday. Over the weekend, President Trump announced a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Russia warmly welcomed and confirmed this ceasefire by conducting more strikes against Ukraine. Specific...
On Saturday, 10 October, at a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, President Trump said that the U.S. and Mexico would come to terms on a new trade deal, and he said Canada does not need to be part of the deal. Trump called the coming agreement with Mexico “great” but gave no d...
Key Takeaways: The United States has steadily lost global wheat export market share since the 1970s, falling from the world's leading exporter to a projected fifth place in 2026/27. The rapid expansion of Black Sea wheat exports, driven by improved productivity and export infrastructure, has r...
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.