General Comments Soybeans are an important crop, so much so that the way they are grown has become a topic to be argued tomorrow in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Monsanto is the largest producer of genetically modified soybean seeds. When it sells seeds to a farmer, it requires that the farmer agree not to save or reuse soybeans as seed, but to buy new seed every year. Monsanto has sued an Indiana farmer for planting unlicensed soybean seeds in violation of Monsanto's patent. Instead of buying Monsanto seeds, the farmer simply bought generic non-seed soybeans from a country elevator and used the purchase for seed — assuming correctly that the soybeans he bought came from Monsanto seeds.The issue before the Supreme Court is whether in...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
Mediterranean/Middle East/North Africa/Africa – MEA Region Pakistan’s smaller wheat farmers have been holding protests to complain about the lack of a support price for wheat and the potential expansion of GMO crop production. They also want the reinstatement of PASSCO, the governme...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
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.