Nutritionists advise eating more fruits and vegetables (F&V). On a calorie basis, F&V can be more expensive than a diet of carbs and fats so a trial program subsidized their use by some recipients of U.S. domestic food assistance. Policymakers are also considering limiting the number of less healthy food products eligible to be purchased using government benefits. New data from USDA’s Economic Research Service reveals some anomalies in the F&V sector. For example, dried fruit is generally more expensive due to the cost of drying, but fresh raspberries at an average $6.61/pound are way up there. Fresh fruits and juices are generally cheaper but not definitively. Canned cherries cost more than frozen raspberries, desp...
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.
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to discuss agriculture and non-tariff trade barriers ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington later this month, potentially opening the door to additional U.S. agricultural purchases or improved marke...
The U.S. will observe Labor Day on Monday, 7 September. U.S. markets and the WPI office will be closed that day. The next edition of Ag Perspectives will be published Tuesday, 8 September...
Key Takeaways: Drought and changes to the multi-year trend in cow slaughter and retention have the potential to dramatically alter beef trim supplies and pricing, and WPI specifically models three different drought scenarios for fall 2026. Based on our models, WPI expects 90 percent lean...