Coming to a Farm Near You Sustainability is increasingly a policy goal in farming and the WTO negotiations over managing fisheries could eventually have implications on land. The harvesting of food, whether from terroir or the sea, involves balancing what nature can and cannot do. Because fisheries are collapsing sooner and faster than failures on land, devising rules to protect the resource have been teed up first. However, the effort has devolved into a dispute between rich and poor nations. Developing countries complain that it is rich nations that run the huge trawler fleets decimating fisheries and that they should not be required to control their own subsistence fishing, or artisanal fishing as they quaintly frame the industry. They...
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
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.