As Gary Blumenthal reported yesterday, the Senate Agriculture Committee held a confirmation hearing on the nomination of Brooke Rollins to be Secretary of USDA. As Gary noted, she “rolled” through the hearings “poised, confident, charming” and had done the groundwork as she pointed out in her opening statement noting that she had already met with every member of the Committee. The following is more about what she said, where she’s coming from, and where she expects to guide USDA. Rollins gave an opening statement about her background, her perspective on agriculture, and her previous roles. Those included being a policy staffer in the office of former Texas Governor Rick Perry, serving at the Texas P...
Macro: Relief Meets Reality July’s CPI report matched expectations. Headline inflation eased to 3.4 percent year over year, while core inflation declined to 2.5 percent. On a monthly basis, headline CPI rose 0.1 percent and core increased 0.2 percent. Equities and the U.S. dollar traded h...
Key Takeaways: Corn yield came in below expectations at 180.7 bushels per acre, validating WPI’s view that last year’s exceptional yield may have anchored analyst estimates higher. Despite slightly higher production for corn, stronger export projections tightened the balance sheet,...
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.