Yesterday, USDA announced that farmers in their last year of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) contracts can opt out early this year. About 3.4 million acres expire this year, and a little more than half, call it 1.7 million, made bids to re-enroll. Overall continuous sign up for CRP has enrolled about 2 million acres this year. Recall, WPI wrote on 7 February that the farm bill process kicked off with a hearing in the House Committee’s subcommittee on Conservation and Forestry to review the farm bill’s conservation title. The hearing focused heavily on CRP, specifically climate related incentives, and the Administration’s plans to increase enrollment by 4 million-plus acres. Then in early March, after Russia&rsqu...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.