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...
What You Need to Know Today: Oil prices extended their rally Tuesday as disruptions to global supplies intensified. Saudi Arabia halted crude loadings at its Yanbu Red Sea port following the shutdown of the East-West Pipeline, while protests by oil-sector security workers forced the suspension...
The USDA has lowered its 2026 red meat production forecasts while leaving poultry almost unchanged. Beef is now projected at 24.877 billion pounds, 90 million pounds below August on slower Q3 fed cattle slaughter and lighter dressed weights, along with an anticipated counterseasonal cutback in...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $156.75/head last week, down $46.05 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while gains in the Choice cutout were comparatively modest. The Choice cutout increased...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.