Politics are once again the tail wagging the dog in commodity markets. U.S. negotiations with Iran fell apart (again) over the weekend after Iran refused to agree to a permanent end of its nuclear weapons program. Rather than a return to the recent status quo, however, markets are adjusting to...
JBS USA announced on Sunday that it has reached a new collective bargaining agreement with UFCW Local 7, allowing the Greeley beef production facility to return to normal operations. The plant had been on strike since 16 March, with approximately 3,800 workers affected. The plant has the capaci...
CORN With a rainy start to April and excess moisture across much of Argentina’s agricultural region, the corn harvest has slowed, advancing just 2 percentage points over the past week to reach 21 percent of the total area. Rainfall during the second and third dekads of March was significa...
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.