Biden’s Beef to Nowhere In 2005, members of the Alaska Congressional delegation tried to add funding equivalent in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars to $566 million. The purpose of the money was to build a bridge to an island with just 50 full-time residents ($11.32 million/person). It mockingly became known as the Bridge to Nowhere and was eventually pulled from the spending bill. As WPI’s Dave Juday wrote yesterday, there will be unintended consequences from President Biden’s current effort to create additional meat packing capacity in the U.S. The meat packing industry says the problem driving the large spread between cattle prices and cutout values is the shortage of labor. Industry spokesperson Sarah Little n...
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.