Ironies of Sequester Politics: Nearly all agree that the across the board U.S. budget cuts (sequester) slated for 1 March is worse policy than making cuts based on a system of rational prioritization. The latter approach is made impossible due to strong representation in Washington (lobbyists) by all recipients of federal funds. In other words, it is democracy that prevents more selective reductions from occurring.One of the ironies in the debate to avoid the sequester is that some of those arguing that it will cause food safety risks to rise and it will bring harm to the meat industry concurrently complain about subsidies to agribusiness. The Executive Branch, under both Republicans and Democrats, has long sought to shift the cost of mea...
Yesterday, Alberta held a referendum on whether to begin the process toward independence from Canada. With more than one million votes counted as of early Tuesday morning, around 77 percent supported remaining in Canada, and 23 percent voted to start the process of separation, according to unof...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
Developer's Note 24 August 2026: WPI recently completed an exercise that updated the codebase for this app and solved some of the discrepancies between our five-year average calculation and USDA's. There are a few lingering cases where early (late) starts (finishes) to the crop cycle resu...
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.