Agrifood and Minimum Wage The agrifood industry is paying attention to the fact that Senate Democrats will seek to pass a 39 percent increase in the mandated minimum wage. The House is unlikely to follow suit, though the issue has a remote chance of getting sucked into a grand bargain budget package. The industry is paying attention because it is the sector that predominantly pays low wages at its 30,000 food processing plants and nearly one million restaurants. Ultimately, the problem with broad-brush pay and income analyses is that they focus on inflation and worker living conditions. By contrast, companies pay workers based on the demand for their products and the incentives necessary to attract sufficient labor. Business analysts a...
What You Need to Know Today: Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans continued to accelerate, with USDA reporting another 558 KMT sold to China and 236 KMT to unknown destinations. Combined with sales announced Wednesday and Thursday, the latest purchases bring the three-day total to approximately...
Key Takeaways: With the fall calf run now upon us, producers are finally getting a glimpse of what their realized profits will be for 2026. Some producers may have already obtained a strong estimate of 2026 revenues, especially if calves were forward sold in, for example, the mid-summer...
As fall begins, wild migratory birds are starting their seasonal migration. That has the industry and government officials worried about the potential spread, again, of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). Some members of Congress have called for the United States to be prepared for a pote...
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.