While Europe is now abandoning its dairy production quotas, congressional farm bill conferees are flirting with adopting the old EU policy of supply-limiting quotas in order to artificially prop up prices.The third annual debate between the top agricultural economists for the U.S. and EU brought informed discussion amidst the concluding House-Senate negotiations on a new farm bill and ahead of next week's third round of negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). CAP Competitiveness There has traditionally been a dichotomy in farm policy approaches across the Atlantic, but now the two economic powers have traded positions. In years past, the U.S. lectured Europe about the importance of market orientation in...
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.