Based on a Depression-era statute, President Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of exports to the U.S., or about 5.2 percent of the $383 billion worth of goods the U.S. imported from Canada in 2025, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Of that total, about $39.3 billion was agricultural trade. The law is the Tariff Act of 1930, Section 338. That’s the same law that was used to dramatically hike tariffs under the Smoot-Hawley Act that led to a worsening of the Great Depression. The new duties would hit dairy products, as well as wine, furniture, cement, clothing, fishing rods, and hockey equipment. They will go into effect 19 August without a new USMCA deal. According to the CBC, asked about the looming tariffs and prospe...
Key Takeaways: Brazil’s growing role in global agriculture is accompanied by a major vulnerability: the country imports approximately 88 percent of its fertilizer needs. High natural gas costs and development challenges have limited domestic nitrogen and potash production despite Brazil&...
Beef packer margins improved sharply to -$51/head last week, up $116 from the prior week as the Choice cutout strengthened while fed cattle prices declined. The cutout rebounded to $369/cwt while fed cattle prices fell to $229/cwt, producing a substantial recovery in packer margins. Profits rem...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
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.