The brand new, only partially-deployed 2014 Farm Bill may have to be rewritten as the outlook for commodity prices is substantially lower than the one used to create it. Farm Bill Rewrite The brand new, only partially-deployed 2014 Farm Bill may have to be rewritten. Development of the new farm support structure was started back in 2010/11 during a bull market. The concept was to ensure that the existing federal budget baseline made it into farmers' pockets regardless of higher prices as well as make it politically palatable by framing it as a form of insurance product. The authors even picked the higher of the three commodity price forecasts available at the time to ensure that no taxpayer money was left on the table. Spin forward to tod...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.