Trump’s Chicken Contradiction The U.S. Supreme Court asked the Trump administration for its position on a lawsuit by 12 states challenging California’s animal welfare requirements for egg-laying hens. The Justice Department surprisingly sided with California, arguing that the state’s requirement does not violate the national Egg Products Inspection Act, has not imposed higher costs and that states lack standing – it is the farmers getting hurt and not the state governments. However, the complainants argue that it is a violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, which was intended to prevent disparate state rules that burden interstate commerce. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is arguing out the other side of i...
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...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.