The Supreme Court will not hear a case against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) decision to approve E15 fuel. At issue were EPA's testing methods and whether the tests were conducted to completion. In addition to the American Petroleum Institute's November 2010 case, other groups from the auto and food industries have filed cases over the impact that E15 could have on each of their industries. Those suits were consolidated into one case. Last August the District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out all of the legal challenges without passing judgment on the EPA's ethanol actions and ruled that the groups did not have standing to file suit because the impacts were too far removed from the EPA's de...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.