The House and Senate were engaged in their last legislative volleys today over the continuing resolution (CR) intended to keep the government in operation after tomorrow, 1 October, which begins FY 2014. The House passed a CR this weekend that defunds Obamacare for one year, repeals the 2.3 percent medical device tax in Obamacare and provides funding to keep the government open until 15 December. That last provision is actually a net cost to the federal government. The medical device tax repeal was added to put more pressure on Senate Democrats. In March, the Senate voted on a non-binding resolution to repeal the tax and 32 Democrats as well as both Independents in the Senate who caucus with the Democrats supported the measure. The resolu...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.