The Senate tomorrow returns from its Memorial Day recess for floor business. It is scheduled to hold a procedural vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a women's pay equity bill intended to highlight political issues before the election. After that, the Senate will likely take up the farm bill, one of the few bipartisan efforts that the Senate or Congress as a whole has crafted this year.The farm bill is likely to be challenged by a number of amendments, as we have previously noted, and could be on the floor for weeks. The goal is final passage by the Independence Day recess (4 July). That would pressure the House to take up the measure after returning from recess. There could be a lot of amendments in the House because the bill is likely to b...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.