Anti-Meat Activist Wayne Pacelle of the Humane Society of the United States may have scored success getting McDonald's to oppose gestation crates for hogs, but his meat math doesn't add up. He told NPR listeners that if everyone cut their meat consumption by 10 percent, it would "save" 1 billion animals. He contends that this may give more space for the animals. He goes on to say it would also be better for our health and the environment. The latter may be correct but, unless he means never being born is to "save," his first two points are contradictory and economically fallacious. Farmers will not produce animals that do not have a market, and the space they allocate is based on the animal's needs and affordability. Cows won't suddenly...
What You Need to Know Today: Declining crop conditions ratings and shaky results from the Pro Farmer crop tour sent grains sharply higher on Tuesday. The Pro Farmer tour in Ohio pegged the state yield at 180.18 BPA, about 5.5 BPA below the tour’s 2025 estimate. Similarly, the Pro Farmer...
Based on a Depression-era statute, President Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of exports to the U.S., or about 5.2 percent of the $383 billion worth of goods the U.S. imported from Canada in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Of that total, about $39.3 billion was agricu...
Key Takeaways: Brazil’s growing role in global agriculture is accompanied by a major vulnerability: the country imports approximately 88 percent of its fertilizer needs. High natural gas costs and development challenges have limited domestic nitrogen and potash production despite Brazil&...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.