Today was National Agriculture Trade Day, an effort to boost awareness about the benefits of trade to the sector. However, the milestone also sparked debate about the increasing U.S. agricultural trade deficit, and the advisability of the Trump tariff war. President Trump’s goal is said to be a more fair and equitable trading system for the U.S. The status quo is described as unfair and unsustainable. Implicit in that assessment is a criticism of past policies that placed the U.S. in the position of running huge trade deficits. But it is sectors like agriculture that are being hurt in the interim by efforts to rectify the situation. There is still great uncertainty about how the war is being conducted, its true aims, and w...
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.