Meat and Veggie Outlook: Food fashion prognosticators are saying that participants in meatless days will increase in 2013. This is likely due to a variety of factors, including the trend toward healthier eating aspirations and the record cost of meat. The movement is aided by improvements in meat substitute products, but there concurrently will be an increased awareness of the food safety issues in the fruit and vegetable sector. Salmonella and other problems in sprouts, lettuce and cantaloupe have been reported, but some argue there has been a larger "leafy green cone of silence" when it comes to the extent of the problems. By contrast, every problem in the meat sector gets mass media attention. A shift toward more vegetable consumption...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
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.