Newly-installed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has indicated that Congress will be officially notified on 15 March that a renegotiation of NAFTA is being sought, a concept that is worrisome to U.S. agriculture. Hyperbolic War The Trump administration issued its first trade policy agenda, and it has several people worried. Headlines initially charged that the document indicates the Trump White House will ignore some WTO rulings if they are deemed unfair. Spokesman Sean Spicer subsequently denied that interpretation. Others say the document was worse before seasoned trade advisors got involved. Even if that were true, however, it would not be new.The U.S. has ignored several past adverse WTO rulings such as the one against the Continu...
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.