Former Nebraska Director of Agriculture Greg Ibach has been confirmed as undersecretary of USDA’s Marketing and Regulatory Programs. He will join Deputy Secretary Steve Censky and Trade Undersecretary Ted McKinney as the senior political appointees supporting Secretary Sonny Perdue heading into the new budget for the remainder of FY 2018, which will be put in place by 8 December (about two months into the fiscal year). However, those three won’t have many colleagues. So far, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has continued to place a hold on Bill Northey, former director of the Iowa Department of Agriculture. This is in response to ethanol advocate senators delaying the nominations of EPA appointees, including William Wehrman as new he...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.