Farm Aid RevivedThe latest Monthly Monitor of agricultural economists showed that 56 percent believe the sector is already in a recession and a whopping 81 percent believe it is on the brink of a recession. The government’s stopgap bill to keep the government funded through March included $10 billion in direct payments for farmers, plus $21 billion in agricultural disaster aid. It had a one-year extension of the current farm bill and allowed year-round use of E15 ethanol fuel. Yesterday, President-Elect Trump told his Republican members of the House to stop the bill over extraneous spending. Today, Mr. Trump and House Republicans surprisingly struck a deal that will allow the package to move forward but it still isn’t clear it will survive...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.