Land Options: While the U.S. harvests cereals from about 35 percent of its arable land and Brazil crops grain and oilseeds on around 26 percent of its arable land, Japan is using 44 percent of its crop area. Yet Tokyo has the problem of nearly 10 percent of its arable land sitting idle. Some want to use it for industrial purposes, which may be its highest utility, but another option is land trading that enables scale-level parcels to be put together and farmed more efficiently.Aggies Win One: It is reported that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has conceded to agricultural interests in the Chesapeake Bay region to pursue continued monitoring of nutrient runoff into the estuary rather than promulgate a new regulation. The gov...
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.