Policymaking Washington is anticipating a farm bill process that will kick off officially very soon. Now is a good time to take stock of what we do and do not know -- as well as what we think -- about the upcoming farm bill process. Most of the issues we have covered already in one form or another, but here is the latest.Budget: The 2012 Senate and House farm bill blueprints come in over budget under the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) scoring done in February. The CBO's May baseline is being finalized and will be the official baseline for the 2013 Farm Bill. When the Agriculture Committees set out their marks, CBO will score them against the updated baseline. Much of the May baseline will be the same as the February baseline, especia...
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...
Key Market Insights Geopolitical Limbo: Geopolitical risk remained a key driver across global commodity markets today. President Trump stated that the Iran memorandum of understanding is not yet final and warned that military action could resume if negotiations fail. Both sides continue w...
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.