As previewed yesterday, the Administration announced the details of the $16 billion COVID-19 relief direct payment program – the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP). Sign up will start on 26 May and the checks will start hitting mailboxes within about two weeks. The payment limit is $250,000 per producer – no per commodity limit. If there are two or three active partners, the limits are $500,000 and $750,000 respectively. USDA will make an initial payment of 80 percent of an eligible 2020 CFAP participant’s calculated payment. The initial payments are meant to provide quick cash flow assistance to those eligible and are at 80 percent to ensure that total payments do not exceed the $16 billion budget. ...
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.