Retiring Senator Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota) is a busy guy in his last year in office. He is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and therefore in the throes of all the deficit and debt debates. In response to Republicans who said that Senate has not passed a budget resolution (as required by the 1974 Budget Act) in the last two years, he has been defending the work that has been done on deficit reduction via the 2011 Emergency Deficit Reduction Act. He's also taken the GOP presidential candidates to task for attacking the sugar program in a debate in Florida. And, he is writing a new farm bill proposal. Conrad, of course, was essentially the driving force behind the 2002 and 2008 Farm Bill drafting. (The latest USDA statistics show...
Key Takeaways: Sugarcane is the world’s largest crop by total production volume, surpassing major commodities such as corn, wheat, and soybeans, and supplies roughly 80 percent of global sugar production. Sugarcane’s perennial growth cycle allows farmers to harvest multiple crops f...
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.