Like the farm bill reauthorization this year, Congress will be taking up the reauthorization of the highway bill. It was passed unanimously last year out of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, but is likely to run into campaign politics this year. The highway authorization expired on 30 September 2009 and has faced eight extensions since. The version that the EPW Committee passed was a two-year extension; like the farm bill, the highway bill is typically a five-year authorization.Speaking at a Transportation Research Board meeting last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (a former Republican member of Congress who serves in the Obama Administration) said it is "highly unlikely" that Congress will pass a reauthorization...
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.