World Perspectives

Parting Shot; Locality Pay

Parting ShotsIn an interview with DTN, outgoing USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack expressed his long-running frustration that farm spending favors larger farms and that the number of farmers and acreage are shrinking. He says the farm bill is outmoded and needs to benefit more farmers and stop the rate of attrition. However, he never says what is the optimal number, just that he doesn’t like the trend. His embrace of “local” agriculture is as outmoded as the farm bill he deplores. To be for local food supplies and for international trade is contradictory. Vilsack is correct that U.S. farm policy needs change, but not in the direction he is suggesting. Government needs to get out of price guarantees for a handful of historical crops and instea...

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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.

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