Productivity Impacts The Kansas City Federal Reserve kicked off its annual conference on agriculture with this year’s topic seemingly a little tin eared. The focus is on productivity. Topics include the role of research and development, technology and data, and spillover effects on the supply chain. There is a session on the environment, but it is not the one that those opposed to conventional agriculture want to hear. Instead of repeating the popular story that agriculture is destroying the planet, the Bank somehow found the opposite – that productivity reduces adverse impacts on the environment. By increasing productivity, the U.S. uses 25 percent less land and less water for farming than in 1950. While activists want agricul...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.