World Perspectives

Vilsack’s Baiting Rhetoric

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack reportedly is asking farm groups how many farmers and how much farmland have gone away since 1981. He then cites the number of farmers lost as 437,100 and farmland as 141 million acres. He’s asking farm leaders if they are “okay” with those losses? First, farm groups should tell Secretary Vilsack that he’s the leader of their pack and he has thousands of experts working for him at USDA. How many farmers and how much farmland does he think there should be? Does he think the Biden Administration’s environmentalist supporters want 141 million acres brought back into production? Does he think farmers should forgo technology in order to justify boosting their labor share by 50 percent?&nbs...

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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.

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