One of the most durable of political chestnuts, the U.S. Food for Peace program will be celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2014. Food for Peace is the foreign assistance program under which most of the U.S food aid during the last 59 years has been provided. Food for Peace is the name given to U.S. food aid by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. However, the food aid program was actually born through legislation, Public Law 480, passed by Congress and signed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. It was championed in the U.S. Senate by Hubert Humphrey (D-Minnesota) and in the House by Robert Dole (R-Kansas), both of whom went on to have illustrious political careers. Before the name was formally changed to Food for Peace in 1961, the pro...
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...
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.