Farm Income Fails Poor William Savedoff of the Center for Global Development notes that evaluations of farmer training programs funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation indicate training was successful, improved cultivation occurred and in some cases farm income was improved, but poverty rates remained unchanged. He argued that the data was too narrow and needs to take account of commodity price fluctuations. However, it could also be that one farmer's gain is another's loss. The fact remains: Too much labor in the sector is a burden to all. The goal should be to move the excess labor into industry and services. Cost of Kicking the Can Woe is me -- the grand bargain on the U.S. fiscal cliff is too complicated. The options include...
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.