Skewing Farm Output The activist group Farm Action is usually slaying mythical creatures like Big Ag or the $750 million checkoff programs used by farm organizations to promote research and marketing. Their typical paean is the small farmer, but their latest focus is farm program structure and the growing U.S. agricultural trade deficit. The group claims that converting less that 0.5 percent of U.S. farmland from growing program crops (largely corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, rice) and instead use them to grow fruits, vegetables and legumes that the trade deficit can be reversed. It is true that the multi-billion-dollar subsidies from Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) support the production of a handful of crops...
Key Takeaways: On Friday afternoon, President Trump announced that Russia will “immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel” to the United States. The deal, typical of this administration, is light on details but promises an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 m...
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.