Geography and Politics The farm bill may be an issue in some political contests this year (see Dave Juday's piece on 15 October), but it does not define most races. A bipartisan survey (North Star Opinion Research teaming with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research) claims that Mitt Romney garners support from 59 percent of rural residents in nine battleground states, while President Barack Obama nets 37 percent. But these are largely white, conservative voters who attend church each week. The surge in Romney's rural support occurred after the debate revealed that he was not the three-headed Ghidorah depicted in opposing campaign ads. By contrast, the second debate was held tonight in the largely minority urban commuter village of Hampstead,...
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.