Horsemeat and Raw Milk USDA is allowing liberty in the marketplace by approving a New Mexico plant to move forward with the legal slaughter of horsemeat for human consumption. Why not go a step further and allow people the choice of consuming raw milk on a national basis? Several states currently ban raw milk because a small percentage contains harmful pathogens. However, but the same can be said of raw meat; thus, restaurants must issue warnings about consuming partially cooked product. Banning raw milk becomes downright awkward when considering the concurrent marketing of tobacco products. Meanwhile, proponents of raw milk argue that pasteurization kills helpful bacteria and other nutrients, but that is akin to arguing over how many an...
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.