Odd Man Up Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is chairman of the powerful U.S. Senate Finance Committee and is at once mainstream and unpredictable. He has said he disagrees with Donald Trump’s use of the national security (Section 232) rationale for extracting concessions from trading partners, and yet he has endorsed the president’s threat to withdraw from NAFTA as a tactic to achieve congressional approval of its successor, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. He is the first to defend U.S. agriculture, but farm groups are anxious over the NAFTA withdrawal tactic. Grassley wants the president to remove Section 232 tariffs from Canada and Mexico, a move supported by farm groups. Antibiotic Correlations The U.S. Food & Drug Ad...
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.