Rollins versus Kennedy With a vote of 72 – 28, Brooke Rollins became the 33rd U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and she achieved the fifth best Senate approval of Trump Cabinet members thus far. By contrast, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. received 20 fewer approval votes, and 20 more disapproval votes than she did in his bid to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has said that he wants to end chemical agriculture and replace HFCS with cane sugar, among other oddball ideas. According to a Farm Journal survey, 90 percent of farmers believe RFK, Jr. is negative for U.S. agriculture. Some in U.S. agriculture believe the sector has been too quiet in the face of RFK, Jr.’s ideas. Now that he is in power and should he p...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to discuss agriculture and non-tariff trade barriers ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington later this month, potentially opening the door to additional U.S. agricultural purchases or improved marke...
The U.S. will observe Labor Day on Monday, 7 September. U.S. markets and the WPI office will be closed that day. The next edition of Ag Perspectives will be published Tuesday, 8 September...
Key Takeaways: Drought and changes to the multi-year trend in cow slaughter and retention have the potential to dramatically alter beef trim supplies and pricing, and WPI specifically models three different drought scenarios for fall 2026. Based on our models, WPI expects 90 percent lean...
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.