Ag Gag The Iowa legislature has passed a bill called "ag gag" by opponents that would make it a crime for animal activists to surreptitiously gain employment for the purpose of videotaping animal welfare. The Center for Food Integrity has the goal of serving as an authenticator of such videotapes, but it requires seeing the taped portions before and after those released by the animal campaigners. The released portion is often taken out of context and animal campaigners are unlikely to give up anything that undermines their message. Agribusinesses can adopt sustainability, core values and corporate responsibility; they can throw out the gestation crates, the battery cages and give every animal a pillow, but it will not slow the anti-conve...
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.