The Senate ag appropriations bill includes funding and reform proposals for two programs that will help make the farm bill slightly easier to craft next year.Following in the steps of the House Appropriations Committee, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved its FY 2018 agriculture appropriation bill yesterday. However, the Senate committee differed in that it made a few down payments on two major concerns teed-up for action in the 2018 Farm Bill, cotton and dairy. At issue is making cottonseed eligible as a minor oilseed under the farm support programs (see Ag Perspectives, 21 February) and participation in the dairy Margin Protection Program (MPP) more attractive to milk producers (see Ag Perspectives, 9 March).CottonThe Senate ag a...
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.