President Obama signed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act on 22 July 2010. Known simply as Dodd-Frank after its principal authors, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Representative Barney Frank (D-MA), it was the Obama administration's response to the U.S. financial crisis of 2008/09. This was passed by Congress in the midst of the deep recession that followed the financial meltdown and from which the U.S. is still slowly recovering. It is a massive 2,000 page piece of legislation that includes 898 pages of statutory text. At the time of the vote, the joke around Capitol Hill was that no member of Congress including its authors had read the entire bill. Whether or not this was precisely true we cannot say, but we doubt many mem...
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...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.