End of GMO Panic When genetically modified wheat was curiously found in an Oregon field in 2013, some importers cancelled their shipments, others stepped up inspection of American wheat, and there were of course lawsuits. There were headlines in 2016 when GM wheat was found in in a field in Washington State. Now USDA is again investigating GM wheat found growing in the same state in an unplanted field that may have once been a test area. However, there is no panic. Moreover, in Europe, where hating on GMOs qualifies as a religion, officials are trying to extricate hopeful new breeding techniques from the laborious regulatory burden of the Novel Foods Directive. Following are at least four factors that should be bringing GMO panic 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.