Capping Farm Subsidies The political left and right are lamenting their failure in this year’s U.S. farm bill debate to more successfully impose stricter caps on farm subsidies to larger growers. The Senate version would limit farms to one manager eligible for a maximum of $700,000 per year. Part of the reason for members of Congress demurring on the topic is the status of farm country this year. Commodity prices have been depressed due to supply and the trade war. This oddball left-right coalition has now worked together against four farm bills, and if the two factions could not be successful in lowering the cap on farm subsidies in 2008 and 2012 when overall farm income was strong, they are not going to get a majority of politicia...
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.