The House ag appropriations bill includes many restrictions on USDA’s use of appropriated funding, and there are 70 amendments that provide more stipulations. Yesterday was the deadline for filing amendments with the Rules Committee, which will meet next Tuesday to decide on the ones that will be offered on the House floor. Several of them are of interest. One reduces funding for the USDA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) by $1 million and increases it by the same amount. The entirety of the amendment language is below: Page 113, line 13, after the dollar amount, insert ‘‘(reduced by $1,000,000) (increased by $1,000,000)’’ Meanwhile, an amendment proposed by Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) i...
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.