Politics of Ethanol The Des Moines Register chides President Obama for visiting Iowa and highlighting his differences with Republican rival Mitt Romney over wind energy subsidies but saying nary a word about the larger controversy in the state: corn ethanol and the drought. His agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, made clear that he opposed an ethanol mandate waiver as it would hurt investor sentiment. This could eventually become another Shirley Sherrod moment for the farm chief. It is a political tightrope walk between grain farmers and food consumers, but it is a political absolute for livestock producers. The Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank notes that livestock producers are currently being hurt the worst. Producers on both sides o...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.