Slowing Urban Sprawl American urban consumers are in a rage over eating local. Somehow the undocumented benefits include slowing the rise of the oceans and curing male pattern baldness. One legitimate upside that can be theorized is that the "eat local" movement will raise the value of urban adjacent land for agriculture and therefore could at least slow suburban sprawl. Subsidy Quid Pro Quo Brazil is warning that U.S. cotton and GSM credit program provisions in the farm bills pending on Capitol Hill still injure Brazilian growers, in some ways worse than under current law. At the same time, it hints that the problems could be solved with a small amount of "tweaking" and that Brasilia could tolerate a level of distortion! Such "toleran...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.