President Donald Trump, a self-declared “Tariff Man,” has made the threat and use of tariffs one of the chief operating mechanisms of his administration’s foreign and economic policies. He has said on numerous occasions that he “likes tariffs” and that they will help make America great again. The use of protective tariffs had fallen into disfavor following World War II, but President Trump has singlehandedly brought them back into play again. In this regard, he has compared himself to William McKinley, a president who never saw a tariff he did not like. Trump has leaned toward a form of an “America First” isolationism. He is skeptical of the value of U.S. participation in international organization...
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...
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.