The Senate Agriculture Committee today released a draft of the 2012 Farm Bill, which is being credited to both Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and Ranking Minority Member Pat Roberts (R-Kansas). The proposal is similar to the product that was put forth for the Super Committee process, with $23 billion in total deficit reduction -- $10 million less than what the House Budget resolution calls for. As Gary Blumenthal wrote in Thursday's Policy Roundup, the House yesterday met its reconciliation obligations by cutting virtually the whole amount from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), sort of side-stepping any further programmatic debate about farm programs. The SNAP cuts are a non-starter in the Senate. The Senate C...
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...
Russian Grain Markets: 12–16 October 2026 During the week in review, the Russian grain market began recovering after an extended decline driven largely by Black Sea logistics bottlenecks, a good crop and weaker global demand in traditional Russian markets. Russia is beginning to harvest c...
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.