Patri Oikonomia: London's Daily Telegraph reports that Pope Francis criticized consumerism and said that, "Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of the poor and the hungry." It is no surprise that economics is a vague and distrusted discipline by both the Pope and the average citizen given that neither has studied the subject very much. While his predecessor was a scholar, Bergoglio has focused his years on obtaining resources for the poor.Scholars like James Twitchell ("Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism") have long clashed with the mass of Catholic theologians who hold that consumerism is bad, perhaps because its narcissism is perceived to deflect from the church's emphasis on charity. However, Rom...
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...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.