China Revising Supportive Procurement Policy for Grains China is revising its 10-year-old supportive procurement policy for grains. The new policy is expected to be an insurance system based on farmers' incomes and planting profits. It aims to protect farmers' incomes when natural disasters affect production or market price fluctuations erode profitability. The farmers will be encouraged to buy insurance based on their income, with about 70-80 percent of the premium to be covered by government subsidies. Soybean, rapeseed, cotton and sugar have been chosen as trial commodities. If this effort is successful, then major grains will follow including corn, wheat and rice. This revision is also reported to be helpful in preventing the cor...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.