According to a study in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the adverse impact from heat and drought over the past 50 years in Europe have tripled crop losses from 2.2 percent to 7.3 percent. The impacts have been higher for row crops such as grains used to feed livestock. This is likely because the higher market value of specialty crops better covers the cost of water management on those acres. Yet the investment in increased irrigation in Europe has been relatively stagnant. Spain, which has historically experienced more drought than northern Europe, has invested more than other countries. The data may not be fully accurate but boosting funding for irrigation would mean intensification of production and thus perceived harmful 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.