Geopolitics Rule During the Cold War, U.S. military planners trumped efforts by American agriculture to challenge the trade distorting effects of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). American farmers were told that the CAP is the glue that holds Europe together, and a divided Europe benefited the pinko-commie Soviet Union. Now geopolitics are trumping the effort to green up the CAP. Russia’s war on Ukraine and a global commodity price spike have pitted food security against the “nature restoration” effort of the F2F with its cut in chemicals and increases in organic and fallow land. Opponents argue that delaying Green Deal measures “is short-sighted, misleading, and even self-destructive.” They rec...
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...
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.