Non-Biotech Subsidies -- Taxpayers Although there is no final decision as yet, it looks as though it will be the taxpayer on the hook to compensate growers of non-biotech crops should they ever find biotech crop pollen affecting them. USDA's advisory committee on the subject (AC21) is leaning toward a proposed solution to the issue involving grower education and subsidies for buffering program/compensation perhaps through the crop insurance program (read: taxpayers). The proposition that non-biotech crop growers will be economically harmed by gene drift from biotech crops has thus far been mostly hypothetical. USDA's earlier approval of biotech alfalfa (see WPI 31 January 2011) despite complaints of potential harm from non-biotech grower...
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.