Immoderate Nutrition In 2010 the Obama administration sought to make the school lunch program comport with the government’s own nutrition guidelines – less fat, sugar and salt but more fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains. School systems reacted by complaining the rules were inflexible and expensive. Now school food program directors and the food industry are cheering the Trump administration for easing the rules a bit, but opponents accuse the government of threatening the health of children. Some school districts are running in the opposite direction, embracing an even less flexible and more expensive initiative, loftily called the Good Food Purchasing Program. Some of the goals are laudable, but the metrics involve the...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.