The End of U.S. Agricultural Exports Agriculture is the first sector receiving retaliation in trade disputes and there is no end in sight for trade wars. The Trump Administration contention that the U.S. has fared badly over the past 25 years of the WTO is not unique, it is largely shared by many on Capitol Hill and for the most part, the Democrats running to become president. Yet, the Trump Administration is not even negotiating with those countries seeking to reform the WTO’s appellate process. Meanwhile, there is a long list of other complaints waiting in the Washington queue for reform including SOE’s and self-designation. International trade lawyer Terence Stewart says he doesn’t see the U.S., Europe, China an...
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.
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...