Agriculture Losing the War Modern agricultural practices will never obtain approval from their philosophical antagonists; the goal is to explain agriculture's scientific and economic rationale to elite opinion leaders who are more committed to facts. Unfortunately, the editorial by the Los Angeles Times against Prop 37 requiring labeling of biotech foods is damning of the entire agrifood system, and hardly helpful to biotech. The paper's problem appears to be that Prop 37 would only inform consumers about biotech while ignoring all of the other evils of the system, like pesticides, antibiotics and animal crowding.It says the U.S. "rushed headlong into producing them [biotech crops] with lax federal oversight." Its minor concession is tha...
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.
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...