Since it is election day in the U.S., we look at how farm income has performed under various presidents. Presidents receive the credit or blame for the overall economy whether it is deserved or not. As the current farm payments attest, presidents likely have more control over farm income than the national accounts. President Franklin Roosevelt entered office with farms imploding from the Dust Bowl and an economic recession, but his Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 turned things around. He served a record 12 years in the White House and gets credit for the largest run of compound annual growth in farm income. His immediate predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had the worst. Richard Nixon had little interest in agriculture, but the second-...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.