Staying in Lanes Under ideal governance, elected legislatures create the principles of public policy. For example, pesticides should be used when proven scientifically safe and banned when proven harmful. Regulators then implement those principles using expertise uniquely held by impartial experts. Politicians come under career ending pressure from activists and voters in a manner not experienced by career scientists. Politics led to a ban on the sweeteners cyclamate and saccharin many decades ago based on junk science and politics, and were subsequently shown to not cause cancer. Now Congressman Bennie Thompson (R-Mississippi) says Republicans will work to allow pesticides banned by the U.S. Environmental protection Agency. Not because Co...
What You Need to Know Today: Markets opened double digits higher Sunday evening following the release of Chinese and American official summaries of bilateral discussions last week. They chose the more optimistic view of future Chinese purchases of American farm goods versus the more opaque inte...
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Friday launched an investigation into the beef industry over potential anticompetitive conduct among the nation’s largest meatpackers, his office announced Friday. He said the investigation would be conducted alongside a separate antitrust probe announ...
Update for 6 April 2025: Last year, users pointed out differences between the 5-year averages reported in this app and what USDA estimates in its weekly report. The difference exists because WPI calculates average based on the last 5 years of observations for the current week. In cases where ob...
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.