The EU has not approved a new biotech trait all year, and it was hoped that the outgoing Commission membership would at least move forward on two cottonseed traits and one rapeseed trait after their final 28 November Appeals Committee. Silly Us Greenpeace, the hyper-critic of biotechnology regardless of the science, has a new report ("Smart Breeding: the Next Generation") advising seed companies to use conventional breeding because it has found that genetically engineered crops "are very limited in sophistication" and are also "less effective." Apparently, those silly seed companies have been using biotech solely to patent the result and make more money. It is true that the $47 billion global seed business conventionally produces valuable...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.