Farm Bill as Obesity Remedy While representatives of producer groups fret over achieving consensus on farm support policy in the 2012 Farm Bill and ensuring it doesn't get decimated in a fight with the Tea Party, there are plenty of members of Congress more concerned about the health and nutrition policy that gets written into the new law. Farmers are relatively comfortable right now, but obesity is ramping up obligations under the $500 billion Medicare program. Despite the malady having complex causes including emotional comfort, sedentary ease, and the intake of multiple calorically-dense foods, politicians are looking for a simple, silver bullet solution.In spite of the unlikelihood of its success, one option frequently mentioned is t...
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.