Limits of Leverage The livestock industry is awaiting word from the U.S. Supreme Court on whether it will hear its challenge to California’s Prop 12 but already there are possible cracks appearing in states going it alone. The state of Massachusetts had adopted its version of Prop 12 on animal welfare called Question 3, but now legislators are voting to delay its implementation. Massachusetts has one-sixth the population of California and ranks number 47 out of 50 states in agricultural production. Suppliers have not been quick enough to change their production methods to satisfy the demands of such a smaller market. Now California’s role as the top agricultural producer is threatened by climate change. Farmers are being paid t...
What You Need to Know Today: The hot, dry weather forecast continues to drive strength in grain futures with corn and soybeans hitting another day of strong gains. Monday’s Crop Progress and Conditions data were in line with market expectations and showed relatively few concerns for the...
Yesterday we wrote about the Q1 GDP numbers and the June employment reports in an article entitled Real GDP for Q1 Relying on AI Buildout, Held Back by Consumer Spending. That article mentioned that consumer spending had become a drag on GDP. Nonetheless, real GDP in Q1 was revised upward to 2...
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.