It is hard to handicap the progress of the farm bill. There is growing momentum to attach the bill to a "grand compromise" fiscal-cliff averting package. The four leaders of the Congressional Agriculture Committees are working together with USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack as the Administration's representative on that strategy. Meanwhile, talks between the Administration via Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and congressional leaders have not proven successful. Lawmakers are frustrated with Geithner's contribution and characterize the progress on a grand compromise as nonexistent.On the table are the Treasury's tax and revenue plans; what is not are its spending plans. Of interest to farm groups regarding taxes is the Administration's proposal of...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Unlike the 2022 fertilizer shock, today’s disruption is rooted less in rerouted trade flows and more in damaged production capacity, raw material constraints and uncertain recovery timelines. That makes this a longer-duration risk for U.S. agricultural producers and retailers who must sec...
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.