The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has confirmed two new cases of New World Screwworm (NWS). One was in Zavala County, Texas, the site of the first case. That case was found in a one-month-old calf, 5.6 miles from the first incident, and the quarantine effort includes both Zavala and nearby Uvalde counties. Another case was discovered in a calf in La Salle County. A fourth case was found in a dog in Andrews County, but that dog was infected in Mexico, though it highlights the dangers of the movement of animals – and people – across the border. A case was detected this spring in a human in Maryland who had previously been in Guatemala. The USDA says it has intensified sterile fly operations, and t...
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.