A second impact analysis on the EU’s Green Deal targets for agriculture has now been reviewed and still the policy is hung up as policymakers debate its future. Like the first go-around, EU analysts insist that a 20 percent reduction in fertilizer use, cutting pesticide use in half and setting aside 10 percent of land for biodiversity will not disrupt food security, production, or prices. Perhaps it is a case of when it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Over-application of inputs can be a problem, particularly in less sophisticated farm operations where the interpretation may be that if a little bit is good, more must be better. But input costs deduct from profits and more competitive operators tend to use a cost-benef...
What You Need to Know Today: The U.S. and Iran agreed to a peace deal on Monday with the deal expected to be signed Friday in Switzerland. The memorandum signed is explicit that Iran will allow 60 days of toll-free transit for all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and President Trump annou...
The U.S. and Iran announced a framework peace deal. Crude oil futures dropped to $83.08, the lowest since early March. The breakthrough comes as President Trump said that if Iran failed to reach a deal, he would order renewed military attacks. An LNG tanker chartered by India’s Petronet c...
Developer's Note: Last year, users pointed out differences between the 5-year averages reported in this app and what USDA estimates in its weekly report. The difference exists because WPI calculates average based on the last 5 years of observations for the current week. In cases where obs...
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.