Rotten Meat Study Activists and the media are the usual sources of erroneous information regarding the agrifood system. That is frustrating enough, but it is highly discouraging when supposedly reputable institutions like Harvard's School of Public Health and the Archives of Internal Medicine disseminate misleading data such as that contained in the "Red Meat Consumption and Mortality" study. Its conclusion was that red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, CVD, and cancer mortality. Various critiques of the "study" zero in on the homogeneity of the subpopulation, the use of notably faulty self-reporting and the failure to isolate other variables, amongst other things.Defenders of the study state that it was a s...
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.