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...
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.
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...