It is easy to get overwhelmed by the debates surrounding farm policy and crop production, especially the current back-and-forth about regenerative agriculture. Regeneration appears to be the word of the decade, the one that won’t go away. Its ubiquity cannot be ignored; in the same way we must consider $50 steaks and destination weddings. The U.S. Senate is currently debating conservation provisions that touch on regenerative agriculture, trying to put together a coherent conservation title for its version of the Farm Bill. Regenerative agriculture is often used in debates as though everyone understands it implicitly, like we have a common understanding. There is a generally accepted definition from a 2020 review in Nature Sustainabil...
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: It was just one of those days where seemingly everything was in the red as part of a broader risk-off economic sentiment amid de-escalation headlines in the Middle East. Other key fundamentals were also bearish, including the resumption of Mexican cattle imports an...
Key Takeaways: U.S. cow-calf producers are facing another year of record-breaking revenues and net returns for 2026, though rising cost pressures and pullbacks in cattle prices increase risks. Drought remains a key concern for much of the cow-calf industry this year, with rising feed cos...
USDA announced on Friday the coordinated, phased reopening of southern U.S.-Mexico livestock ports starting 24 August 2026, after more than a year of closures due to the spread of New World screwworm (NWS). Douglas, Arizona, will be the first port of entry to resume cattle trade on 24 August. T...