USDA’s delay of its quarterly agricultural trade report, and exclusion of its typical explanatory text, raised concerns because the moves raised questions about the objectivity of the data. The bottom line is that the trade is uneasy about USDA statistics now. USDA data is considered a go...
Corn Argentina’s corn harvest advanced 3.3 percentage points over the past week and reached 43.8 percent of the estimated area nationwide. Progress remains slow due to high grain moisture and inaccessible soils in some regions. Still, harvest pace is 8 points ahead of last year &mda...
Regional News Russia’s recent strikes against Ukraine and poor progress in peace talks between the two countries in Istanbul have added “war risk” premia back into several markets, including wheat. Farmers in Spain and France were protesting, again, agricultural im...
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.