In December 2021, USDA Secretary Vilsack urged the industry to “get in a room” to hash out a consensus on addressing dairy policy. This weekend, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) hosted the Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) forum in Kansas City. The meeting was convened to discuss reforms to FMMOs to fix shortcomings and unintended consequences of the regulated pricing system – many of which were exposed by the impact of COVID. Prior to the 2018 farm bill, under the FMMO, Class I prices were calculated by using the higher of Class III and IV advanced skim milk prices (SMP). In 2018, that was changed to an average of the two, plus a $0.74 per hundredweight premium. What happened during COVID was that...
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.