Lower crop prices and farm income together with pressure for new products are leading to a wave of consolidation in the ag sector. One of the little-discussed, major implications of this will be the effect on the K Street lobbying corridor in the nation’s capital.Lower crop prices and farm income after historic highs in several recent years together with pressure for new products are forcing agricultural input companies to look at creating a deeper pool of resources, and this is leading to a wave of consolidation in the ag sector. That was exemplified by the news this week that Bayer A.G. has successfully completed terms to acquire Monsanto. Bayer will pay $128 per share of Monsanto in cash and will assume its $10 billion in debt. This foll...
What You Need to Know Today: Grain futures fell hard overnight after the USDA’s Crop Conditions report showed better-than-expected ratings for corn and soybeans, despite difficult weather last week. The Conditions report was even more bearish in light of meaningfully beneficial rains acr...
Key Takeaways: New Mexico’s Clean Transportation Fuel Program expands demand for low-carbon fuels and creates another market for renewable feedstocks, adding incremental pressure to already limited supplies of lower-carbon inputs. Growing competition for waste-based feedstocks such as an...
As WPI reported on 17 July, the recently passed budget reconciliation bill in the House Budget Committee includes $12 billion in emergency farm assistance. This would be the seventh of the past nine years with ad hoc farm payments (FY2018, FY2019, FY2020, FY2022, FY2023, FY2024, and potentially...
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.