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.
Egg prices have been through a volatile 18 months, rallying sharply in LH 2024 and into early 2025 as bird flu decimated the U.S. layer flock. In early 2025, the U.S. layer flock for table eggs specifically fell to at least a 10-year low, at 286.4 million birds, down about 16 percent from the 2...
Markets Not Government A common refrain from U.S. agriculture groups is that they prefer to get their income from the market than the government. Most of their income is derived from the market but it looks more romantic than real when one considers that government supplements determine the bre...
2025 Review The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs says China produced a record 714.9 MMT of grain in 2025, an increase of 8.4 MMT, or 2.6 percent. The volume was achieved despite bouts of drought, prolonged rainfall, and flooding. Most of the increase was in maize, and output was booste...
USDA’s Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) published a new rule for crop insurance late last year, the Expanding Access to Risk Protection (EARP) rule that eliminates buy-up coverage for prevented planting policies. The rule proposes to: Increase premium subsidies from 5 to 10 crop...