Every five years, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, issued by USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are updated. The new guidelines will be issued next year for 2025-2030. This guidance provides advice on what to eat and drink to meet nutrient needs, promote health, and prevent disease. It is developed and written for a professional audience, including policymakers, healthcare providers, nutrition educators, and Federal nutrition program operators. Federal feeding programs adhere to the guidelines. Increasingly, these guidelines have become more controversial, culminating in 2015 when the guidelines included sustainability and environmental goals, and failed to include any recommendation to include red meat in...
What You Need to Know Today: It was a quiet trading day across major agricultural commodities, with most contracts closing within 1 percent of the previous day's settlement. Trading volumes for corn and the soy complex were lighter than earlier in the week, as traders were positioning before a...
New World Screwworm Another day, another case of New World Screwworm. USDA has reported nine cases of New World Screwworm (NWS) in the U.S. Of the nine reported cases, eight are located across four counties in Texas—Edwards, Gillespie, La Salle, and Zavala. Of the eight cases in Texas, si...
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the debates surrounding farm policy and crop production, especially the current back-and-forth about regenerative agriculture. Regeneration appears to be the word of the decade, the one that won’t go away. Its ubiquity cannot be ignored; in the same way we...
From WPI Consulting
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.