Word is that USDA is considering allowing cotton farmers access to not just the subsidy program the industry demanded as their key support in the 2014 Farm Bill, the Stacked Income Protection Plan (STAX), but also to the one crafted for grain and oilseed farmers. Renegotiation of TPP U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) sealed the fate of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with his cautionary message to the Obama administration against sending the agreement to Capitol Hill before the November 2016 election. The situation mimics trade agreements negotiated at the end of prior administrations that were left stranded until uncensored successors took office. However, the political problems with TPP are largely self-inflic...
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.