Monday is the Presidential Inaugural. This week has seen several Senate confirmation hearings on cabinet appointees. Both the Republicans and Democrats, Trump transition team, and Congress are prepping for the new Administration which will show up to work on Tuesday morning. USDA Subcabinet: On 25 November, WPI wrote that Secretary of Agriculture nominee designate Brooke Rollins’ success as Secretary will “be aided by the sub-cabinet appointees that fill out the rest of USDA.” Three nominees for those posts were named yesterday. Much like the first Trump term, the pool of subcabinet appointees draws heavily from State Departments of Agriculture, and two of them would be making an encore appearance at USDA.The p...
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.
There was heavy volume exiting soybeans, which dragged down the broader market today. The lack of a specific Chinese buying commitment for soybeans undermined speculators who had placed bets on state-directed trade. But even the Chinese do not totally ignore market fundamentals. They may still...
On Tuesday, 12 May, WPI reported on an Executive Order being prepared by the Trump Administration to suspend tariff rate quotas (TRQs) on beef from all exporters for 200 days as a means of addressing high beef prices in the United States. After considerable pushback from cattle producer groups,...
WPI has officially launched Transportation Perspectives as a standalone weekly report separate from our Ag Perspectives articles and analysis. Current Ag Perspectives subscribers will have gratis access to the report through 16 April 2026. Please email us or subscribe online after this date to...