Environmentalists and climate warriors have long targeted agriculture, particularly intensive animal agriculture, as a prime source of greenhouse gases and global warming. And as the largest agricultural producer, the U.S. has been the bullseye of their target. It is estimated that agriculture produces about 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases with a third of that coming from the gas, which contains methane, passed by cattle. The cattle business and feedlots have been singled out by environmentalists as an important source of climate change. They argue that if cattle production (with its flatulence) could be eliminated in the U.S. and in other countries where it is a major sector, this would have a greater beneficial impact than the Paris Cl...
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.