USDA announced this week that more than $7 billion will be paid out in farm support payments under the new ARC and PLC programs versus approximately $5 billion last year. Perhaps the only good fiscal news for the next farm bill is that SNAP is forecast to have a decreasing baseline of spending.USDA announced this week that more than $7 billion will be paid out in farm support payments under the new Ag Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs versus approximately $5 billion last year. These programs replaced the Direct Payment program, which operated under the previous farm bill and cost about $5.2 billion annually. Based on the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data, farm and conservation support payments are the fa...
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.
Key Takeaways: Lamb and goat tariffs protect market share, not prices. The flock is too small to respond quickly, and the burden depends on origin: 12.5 percent on Australia and New Zealand, reportedly 37.5 percent plus the base rate on China. Wool is most exposed via the export side. The U.S...