This is the second in a three-part series of reports from WPI’s analysts in Ukraine. This article involves their opinion of Ukrainian agriculture in the weeks ahead. Looking Inward Crop Substitution: Russia may not change its crop production focus for the upcoming campaign, but Ukrainian farmers will alter what they plant. They will grow anything that costs them less. Some have already given up on planting sugar beets. There will also be less corn, sunflower, and wheat. The rapeseed planted in the fall is not impacted. In western Ukraine, they are sticking to what they do, planting potatoes and other local crops. Some suggest this is about what can be exported but fundamentally it is about what a farmer with dwindling money can plan...
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.