This year's farm bill became a showdown over nutrition spending and policy. Predictably, when the cost of the near-trillion-dollar farm bill was reported in the news, farm-state politicians were quick to point out that nearly 80 percent of the spending was not farm related, but rather for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) -- formerly known as food stamps -- and other nutrition programs provided by USDA.So what is the next logical step? The House Republican Leadership is actively pursuing a plan to separate farm programs and nutrition programs into two pieces of legislation. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia), who held the farm bill from the House floor schedule last year, is the chief proponent of the idea. Cantor's...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.