Vilsack Needed on Farm Bill: Previous administrations have been highly engaged with Congress in the writing of new farm bills. The Reagan Administration had farm language proposals in 1981 and 1985. USDA Secretary Clayton Yeutter produced a Green Book providing specific guidance to the Congress on what should be in the 1990 Farm Bill. USDA Secretary Dan Glickman held his own farm bill hearings to build a policy thrust for the 1996 Farm Bill. Secretary Veneman had long-time Senate Agriculture Committee staffer Chuck Conner on Capitol Hill every day negotiating the 2002 Farm Bill. USDA Secretary Mike Johanns took the extraordinary step of offering legislative language and detailed proposals.Secretary Tom Vilsack now gets a second bite at th...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
Developer's Note 24 August 2026: WPI recently completed an exercise that updated the codebase for this app and solved some of the discrepancies between our five-year average calculation and USDA's. There are a few lingering cases where early (late) starts (finishes) to the crop cycle resu...
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.