FSIS Furlough Update During a House Ag Committee hearing yesterday, USDA Undersecretary for Food Safety Elizabeth Hagen yesterday said that furloughs for federal meat inspectors will begin in July and continue through August. Hagen further noted that no sequesters will be on consecutive days and there will not be regional "rolling" furloughs. All furloughs will happen on the same day, leading to interruptions in meat and poultry packing.As Hagen testified before the committee, the Senate continuing resolution (CR) was being amended with a provision that would grant flexibility to the USDA, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Commerce and Department of Justice in administering sequester cuts in a way that would not require di...
Key Takeaways: Brazil confirmed a Newcastle disease outbreak at a commercial turkey farm in Santa Catarina on 18 October, raising concerns about potential disruptions to poultry exports despite the outbreak being confined to a single facility thus far. Mexico and Malaysia have imposed nationwi...
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...
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.