It was 19 degrees Fahrenheit in Fargo, North Dakota this morning and we are in the middle of a winter blizzard. All schools and many businesses closed. On the same date last year the high temperature was 78 degrees and there was no snow on the ground. Some golf courses opened this week last year. The low temperature forecast for the first "official" day of spring later this week is 15 degrees below zero. That is 30-40 degrees below normal. Ice was off regional lakes by late March last year, but it is still 2-3 feet thick today. There is no significant warm-up in sight. Last year we had the warmest winter on record and, of course, those of us who reside in the northern climes were welcoming global warming. This year (so far) has been very...
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.