Farm Bill Animal Disease Measures The House of Representatives passed the final conference report on the 2018 Farm Bill yesterday (397-46), which followed the Senate’s passage on Tuesday (87-13). The primary provisions for livestock were the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program, and the National Animal Health Vaccine Bank. Those new programs are intended to address the risk of animal disease “affecting the economic interests of the U.S. livestock and related industries, including the maintenance and expansion of export markets.” Funding is set at $120 million for fiscal years 2019-2022. A minimum $20 million of that is reserved for the disease preparedness and response program with the remaining $100...
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.