We at WPI hear frequently that U.S. agriculture is broken and needs fixing. This argument is often heard in MAHA-related discussions and focuses on highly processed food consumption or the overuse of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Among farmers and food processors, however, especially those in the fruit and vegetable and meat and dairy production sectors, there is broad agreement that access to labor is what needs fixing. Their labor costs are increasing, import competition is intensifying, and many of them cannot further mechanize their processes to increase labor productivity. Hence, many support a significant change to U.S. immigration policy in the current form of the Farmworker Modernization Act (FWMA) or other related legislatio...
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.