USDA has opened a comment period on its agency reorganization plan. Comments will be accepted until 26 August. The plan is similar to that of the first Trump Administration, which was widely panned by USDA personnel. One of the primary goals is to move employees out of the high-cost Washington, D.C. region to lower cost regions, as well as to move the services closer to farmers who need them. This area has one of the highest cost-of-living in the country. Therefore, to ensure USDA is located closer to the people it serves while achieving savings to the American taxpayer, USDA will relocate much of its Agency headquarters and DC-based staff to five hub locations. These hubs were based on cost-of-living and the existing concentration of USDA...
What You Need to Know Today: Russia rejected calls for a ceasefire in the Black Sea, including a proposal to halt attacks on civilian shipping that could help restore grain flows from Ukrainian ports. Tyson Foods announced plans to permanently close its Joslin, Illinois, beef processing facili...
The big news in the cattle markets yesterday was Tyson Foods’ move to close two more beef plants. One of them, the Joslin, Illinois, plant was shuttered immediately after the announcement. The other, in Eagle Mountain, Utah, is a case-ready plant that does not slaughter cattle. Tyson also...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Wednesday. In July, the CPI rose 0.1 percent, seasonally adjusted, and rose 3.4 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy, or the “core” infla...
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.