Longer Farm Bill Delay: As predicted by Dave Juday in yesterday's report, the Senate farm bill is too weighted down to move quickly. Over 120 amendments were filed for the markup of the Senate Agriculture Committee's 900-page draft 2012 Farm Bill. Moreover, huge funding inequities, whereby Southern crops like cotton and rice are facing 70-80 percent reductions in income transfers based on the January CBO baseline, meant strong opposition from key senators. There are lots of other problems in the bill and they all add up to a longer delay before the bill is actually marked up. The Senate is on recess next week and staff will scramble to try and settle as many differences as possible during that time. However, it is a challenge that may cau...
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&...
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.