Farm Bill Moolah The farm bill is ready to begin moving in a few short weeks with the only holdup being the lack of money desired by congressional farm leaders to spend on cotton and dairy. Commodity support subsidies cost $13 billion more last year than originally forecast in 2014, partially offset by crop insurance costing $11 billion less than expected. Dairy and cotton groups want a billion dollars more to spend on their commodities, but there is no baseline for it. Consequently, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway (R-Texas) wants to find a must-pass bill to tack it onto (e.g., the continuing resolution funding the overall government). One risk is that more spending on cotton will bring back litigation with the Brazili...
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.