Artisanal Meat The Biden Administration puts the taxpayers’ money where its heart is but it doesn’t always add up to real dollars and cents. It has allocated $1 billion out of the American Recovery Act to boost competition in the agrifood sector, including the offering of grants to train local butchers. These local butchers are supposed to give the big meat packers a run for the average family’s budget spent on the center and most expensive part the meal. The plan is quaint for its economic naivete. The big meat packers enjoy economies of scale, and the use of a workforce that is nearly half foreign born and a large majority of them are not U.S. citizens. On top of that, they have used their large capital holdings...
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.