World Perspectives
farm-inputs

Changes in Chemical Usage

The U.S./Canada and Europe have increased pesticide usage only slightly over the past two decades whereas South America’s usage has grown by almost 120 percent. Africa’s pesticide usage in agriculture has grown by nearly 69 percent, but from a very small base. Asia is the dominant applicant of pesticides, utilizing 54 percent of the chemicals where usage has grown by 32 percent over the same period. However, South America has become an increasingly large supplier of food to Asia, which means that utilization of the chemicals has been exported to largely Brazil and Argentina. ...

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From WPI Consulting

Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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