World Perspectives

Farm Policy Going to Pot

The biggest crop-related issue today is not what might happen in the upcoming farm bill; rather, it is what occurred yesterday at the Department of Justice. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the so-called Cole memo, issued by then Deputy Attorney General James Cole in 2013, and four other Obama-era directives dating back to 2009 that set guidelines of noninterference/nonenforcement regarding federal law within states where marijuana was legal. The chart below, detailing the 2016 per-pound crop prices in Colorado, shows why this is a big deal. The value of marijuana in this state was more than 24,000 times that of alfalfa hay.

Sessions’ memo puts recreational marijuana operations in jeopardy (e.g., the 40-acre operation that...

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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.

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