Ethanol blending rates increased in 2022 according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), especially during this summer. In April the Biden EPA issued a one-year emergency waiver to allow year-round E15 in part to reduce retail gasoline prices in response to supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine and other factors that led to higher fuel prices at the pump. This was only a temporary emergency waiver, however. In May 2019, the Trump EPA issued a rule allowing year-round use for E15, but in July 2021 the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the rule based on the fact that Congress, through the Clean Air Act, has the jurisdiction over E15 blends and emissions volatility, and thus, only Congress can change them. Indeed, the Clean A...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
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.