At the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) winter policy conference in Washington this week, animal welfare was among the topics covered. In particular, the California ban on battery cages for egg layers. Back in 2008, California voters passed Proposition 2, which prohibits the confinement of certain farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up and fully extend their limbs. The measure deals with three types of confinement: veal crates, sow gestation crates and, most prominently, battery cages (California is a significant player in egg production). Implementing the statute has been a difficult task for California. To protect its own producers, the Golden State has...
Key Takeaways: Brazil confirmed a Newcastle disease outbreak at a commercial turkey farm in Santa Catarina on 18 October, raising concerns about potential disruptions to poultry exports despite the outbreak being confined to a single facility thus far. Mexico and Malaysia have imposed nationwi...
What You Need to Know Today: Harvest pressure in the U.S. sent corn and soybeans lower as supplies increased and there were signs USDA’s upward revisions to yields in the October WASDE could be close to right. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated over the weekend, with Ukrai...
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.