The chance for fast-tracking the farm bill as an attachment to the payroll tax cut extension has been lost. Congress today will vote on a final compromise package negotiated between the House and Senate that would keep the unemployment tax at 4.2 percent (from 6.2 percent) through the end of 2012, reduce unemployment eligibility from 99 weeks to 63 weeks (or 73 weeks in some states), and provided a fix to the Medicare plan that would prevent a drop in physicians' payments. As we noted on 14 February, Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana) and Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota) had advocated attaching a farm bill to the payroll tax cut extension.As for the president's proposed budget cuts for agriculture contained in the FY 2013 budget proposal present...
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.