ARC Honey Attracts Bees Historically, agriculture has been presented as a highly risky enterprise, though statistically it fares better than other business enterprises. Gregory Meyer points out in the Financial Times that institutional investors have their eyes wide open to the fact that crop insurance combined with the Ag Risk Coverage (ARC) provision's shallow loss protection means that 90 percent of a farm's risk is insured against loss. There are very few other investment opportunities in the economy with such a low risk of loss, record profits plus asset accretion in an otherwise sluggish economy. Consequently, if the 2012 Farm Bill includes the Senate Agriculture Committee's provisions as currently written, don't be surprised if ou...
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.