The House of Representatives today voted down the farm bill by a vote of 195-234. This is the first time in recent memory that a farm bill has failed. As clients will recall from earlier reports, the strategy of Ag Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Oklahoma) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was to get 170 Republican votes and attract 70 Democratic votes. By party, the vote breakdown is below. Six members did not vote: one Republican and five Democrats.Boehner wanted to follow the "Hastert Rule" -- named after former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois) – which is that the majority party has to have a majority of votes to pass a bill. Boehner used a great amount of political capital on this bill, urging Republicans to support it desp...
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...
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.