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...
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.
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...