Newly-minted USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue needs to tell his Commerce Department counterpart Wilbur Ross to mind his own portfolio. Meanwhile, former USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack is telling Canadians that it’s time to modernize NAFTA but improve U.S. market access to certain areas. Ignorance on Agriculture Newly-minted USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue needs to tell his Commerce Department counterpart Wilbur Ross to mind his own portfolio. In response to concerns regarding Trump administration rhetoric about canceling trade agreements, Ross reportedly advised, “If I were a farmer, I would plant as much as I can logically plant in today’s environment.” Then he echoed an oft-repeated but erroneous claim that, “the rest of the world is incapable of fe...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
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.