Ag Technology While activists maintain their war against modern agricultural technologies like biotechnology, the push back by ag and governments is just as hard. Greenpeace Australia called for a ban on GM wheat but there were stronger signals this week in the opposite direction. UK Environment Minister Caroline Spelman said GM may help crops defend against drought. The EU Commission announced the approval of four more GM soybean events, and technology was robustly defended when seven former USDA secretaries gathered at yesterday's annual agency Outlook Forum. Indeed, USDA announced that it would try and halve the time it takes for GM products to achieve approval. Mercosur's new quasi-unified GM approval process promises quicker trait a...
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.