Some studies suggest that Hershey's decision to no longer use sugar produced from sugar beets may end up causing more harm to the environment as a result. Unsweet Impacts Hershey’s announced that it would no longer use sugar produced from sugar beets since they are all genetically modified. The company admits that the decision is not due to any safety concerns but is instead a marketing angle. Ironically, some studies (Christodoulou, Kazantzi, Bezergianni and Gounaris, etc.) suggest that this move may end up causing more harm to the environment as a result. Sugarcane is not genetically engineered, but it tends to be grown in environmentally-sensitive areas such as those adjacent to the Florida Everglades. It also uses a great deal of wate...
Congress is moving forward with its FY 2027 spending bills, while also still working to address FY 2026 funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is still in a shutdown. The House Agriculture-FDA Appropriations Subcommittee marked up and passed its FY 2027 bill. The House bill prov...
Update for 6 April 2025: 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 ob...
Beef packer margins improved to -$100/head last week, up $28 from the prior week as the Choice cutout stabilized following its brief post-Easter decline while fed cattle prices eased modestly. The cutout firmed to $384/cwt, while fed cattle prices slipped to $246/cwt, allowing packer margins to...
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.