Siloed Everywhere International trade has become moral, geopolitical, and nationalistic, and so has local commerce. Global trade is now based on perceived and relative practices such as human rights, animal welfare, labor, environmental protection, etc. Don’t trade with autocrat regimes like China or Russia. There is Make in India, Buy America, food sovereignty, etc. This has crept down to state and local affairs. California dictates how hogs are produced in Iowa and bans state-funded travel to Texas. Fights over abortion, immigration and other issues pour over red versus blue states, and between cities and rural areas. All of it worsening economic outcomes but unlikely to go away anytime soon. Separately, EU plans to punish a...
What You Need to Know Today: The cattle market rebounded sharply this week, with January feeder cattle futures gaining $16.98/cwt and February live cattle futures advancing $7.60/cwt since last Friday. Tyson Foods' plans to restore a second processing shift at its Amarillo, Texas, facili...
Tuesday’s CPI report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed inflation roaring back stronger than expected in October. That probably locks in another rate hike – which was expected anyway – at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting in December. Consumer pric...
Key Takeaways: The rationale for farm programs has changed significantly from their original intentions. Farmers’ incomes have grown sharply and have surpassed non-farm incomes beginning in the 1970s. Current farm programs are complex and focus on supporting risk management, environmenta...
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.