Today's date is 1 October 2013. The nine-month extension of the Food Energy and Conservation Act ended yesterday, 30 September 2013, with the end of the fiscal year. That means that farm programs have technically reverted to permanent law. Meanwhile, the federal government has shut down as of midnight last night, which begs the question as to whether permanent law is indeed in effect. The shutdown is based on the status of appropriations bills which cover agencies' spending on salaries, rent, operations and from a policy perspective, discretionary programs. Farm programs are entitlement programs and the shutdown does not impact the budget status of permanent authorizations. That is, money can still be spent by the agency on programs that...
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...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.