House Farm Bill Conundrum The U.S. Senate is likely to pass a 2012 Farm Bill, but it is far less certain that the House will take up the measure. According to one former official with a half-dozen farm bills under his belt, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) insists that the floor consideration of legislation will be reasonably open to amendments. At the same time, however, there is fear that Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats will collectively make any House Agriculture Committee-approved bill look unrecognizable. Thus, the summer schedule for legislation in the House issued by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) does not mention consideration of the farm bill.House Republicans have heretofore charged Senate Democrats as...
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.