Farm Bill Predictions Crop Insurance: A farm bill passed by the House is unlikely to either cap crop insurance payments to farmers or tie them to conservation programs. Even if the Senate adopts either of these restrictions, it is unlikely to stick in a House-Senate conference committee and thus unlikely to ever become law.Target Prices: The House teams with Senate Southerners and crafts a return to target prices, which transition over time. Inhumane Harassment Tactics If meat producers treated their animals the way animal rights campaigners at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) treat farmers, it would be considered harassment. The pro-vegan organization gets nowhere at USDA with its complaints, so it is running to a differ...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.