This is a list of vignettes about the most consequential politician of our times. Donald Trump is not complicated if one just reads the rants of his opponents, of which there is a lengthy list. But as the journalist Matthew Continetti says, “Trump criticism is an oversaturated market.” No one disagrees that tariffs are harmful and free trade is good, that norms are being broken, and that Constitutional law should prevail. But there have been tariffs, there has been unfair trade, and Mr. Trump is not the first politician to push the limits of law. Mr. Trump’s predecessor refused the courts’ rejections of his student loan forgiveness plans and he rejected enforcement of immigration laws as just some recent exampl...
What You Need to Know Today: It was a quiet trading day across major agricultural commodities, with most contracts closing within 1 percent of the previous day's settlement. Trading volumes for corn and the soy complex were lighter than earlier in the week, as traders were positioning before a...
New World Screwworm Another day, another case of New World Screwworm. USDA has reported nine cases of New World Screwworm (NWS) in the U.S. Of the nine reported cases, eight are located across four counties in Texas—Edwards, Gillespie, La Salle, and Zavala. Of the eight cases in Texas, si...
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the debates surrounding farm policy and crop production, especially the current back-and-forth about regenerative agriculture. Regeneration appears to be the word of the decade, the one that won’t go away. Its ubiquity cannot be ignored; in the same way we...
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.