It is less than one month before the new 1 March sequestration deadline. The original sequester was to be triggered on 3 January 2013 if Congress failed to pass a budget by December 2011 that cuts $1.2 trillion over 10 years. This original deadline was set to incentivize Congress to act. However, there is a growing sentiment in Washington to let the sequester take place.That sentiment is not universal. As Gary Blumenthal reports today, the president is seeking a series of smaller cuts to delay sequestration. On the Republican side, Representative Frank Wolf (R-Virginia) today introduced legislation to adopt the Simpson-Bowles blue ribbon deficit panel recommendations as an alternative to sequestration. Generally, however, the tax portion...
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...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.