In his State of the Union (SOTU) address, President Biden outlined a number of policy priorities with potential impacts on agriculture. Many of them are prior policy goals and initiatives which have already drawn at least caution, if not opposition, from the ag sector. For example, highlights from the speech include: Cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 (just six years away) from 2005 baseline emissions which hold potential for agriculture through carbon sequestration and credit trading, but which could also come with added regulatory costs to agriculture. IBEW workers building and installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, which as the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) said, has the potential to reduce liquid fuel u...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.