Alternative Energy Roughhouse It was a smash-up week for alternative energy with more contradictory studies flying, legislative paring and mealy mouthed bed feathering.Ugly Studies: There was the renewed assertion by Princeton's Timothy Searchinger (this time on behalf of the Friends of the Earth) that biofuel mandates cause indirect land use changes (ILUC) and contribute toward global hunger. Biofuel proponents rightfully counter that world hunger has a more complex origin. However, critics like Matthias Finkbeiner of the Technical University of Berlin are as un-rooted on the ILUC as as Searchinger is on hunger. Without doubt, the current ILUC approaches are substandard but that is due to current overwhelming modeling complexity,...
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
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.