Over the weeks since the Senate reported out its version of the farm bill, WPI has highlighted some potential amendments that could be offered on the Senate floor: peanuts, dairy and others. Now add to that list crop insurance, the centerpiece of the Senate proposal's risk management portion. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) is planning to introduce a cap on premium subsidies that a farmer could receive under the federal crop insurance program. The proposal for the cap is likely to be $40,000.As we reported on 12 April (see WPI), the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report concluding that if a $40,000 limit had been applied to individual farmers' crop insurance premium subsidies, as it is for other farm programs, the federal govern...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Russian Grain Markets: 12–16 October 2026 During the week in review, the Russian grain market began recovering after an extended decline driven largely by Black Sea logistics bottlenecks, a good crop and weaker global demand in traditional Russian markets. Russia is beginning to harvest c...
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.