EU trade negotiators will reportedly offer their U.S. counterparts tariff elimination on 96 percent of goods, and while tariffs will remain on sensitive products like pork and beef, larger tariff rate quotas will be offered. Aid to the Irrelevant USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack famously ascribed problems passing a farm bill as follows, "It's the fact that rural America with a shrinking population is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country." Yet today the President of the United States signed into law a farm bill written by Congress that is exactly what rural America lobbied for, plus he announced a new "Made in Rural America" export and investment initiative. Admittedly, the new initiative is an odd set of platitudes. A...
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...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.