Over-greening Bees In 2018 we were all warned that a third or more of our food supply was being threatened by the struggles facing bees. Europe focused on insect pollinator health, including banning (with exceptions of course) neonicotinoid pesticides as a threat to pollinators. American researchers became focused on Colony Collapse Disorder. Pesticides, parasites, loss of habitat and climate change were all blamed for killing bees and thus the food supply. Now the New York Times reports that conservationists are trying and mostly failing to combat this widespread belief that honey bees are in danger. The notion that bees were threatened sparked a growth industry for bee colonies that now are threatening other pollinator species. Sc...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...