World Perspectives

Factless Nostalgia; Cash is King

Factless Nostalgia There is yet another crusader against the modern agrifood system. This time it is Austin Frerick, who claims authenticity due to his Iowa roots but he is just another Ivy League university (Yale) pontificator hollering from the ivory tower. His book, “Barons,” complains about “monopolies” that have “gutted” rural America and for “bleeding” the taste from American food. He harkens back to 1980 when a drive across Iowa revealed hundreds of small farms. It is not clear why he picked that year instead of going back 100 years and reminiscing about seeing thousands of even smaller farms.  It is not very scholarly since it ignores all the detriments of the bygone era. Such a...

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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.

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