Two of the biggest items on the table for the current farm bill conference are nutrition spending under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the difference in the structure of the commodity programs between the House and Senate farm bills. Both issues have been hit by some predictable but complicating current factors.First, nutrition. The SNAP program has been growing for the past four years. SNAP advocates attribute that to the state of the economy, although that is not necessarily the case. While the economy has grown slowly, it has been doing so for the past three years. Since the third quarter of 2009, there has only been one quarter in which GDP was not positive. What drove SNAP participation more was the expecta...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Key Market Insights Macro markets delivered a full whipsaw today. Early in the session, crude oil had rallied back above $100/barrel as traders priced renewed concern over the U.S.-Iran standoff and potential supply risk through the Strait of Hormuz. That strength helped pull grains off their o...
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.