Vilsack's Threat USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack issued a clever, even if flawed threat by saying USDA would not be able to make full or continuing compensation payments to Brazil in the cotton case. The reasons he gave, which included sequestration and the expiration of the farm bill, do not entirely add up. After all, the payments are made via the CCC Charter Act, a permanent law written in 1933, that is so generous in the authority it grants the Secretary of Agriculture that nothing like it will ever be written again. Additionally, while sequestration was initially portrayed by the Obama Administration as completely inflexible in an effort to end it, the scaremongering failed and the government has subsequently found all kinds of ways to...
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.