Battle Over Scale Catherine Badgley, a University of Michigan ecologist, says she envisions a U.S. shift from fewer large farms to many small farms -- and thus higher priced food by 2050, assuming farm subsidies are shifted to encourage this vision. It seems unlikely the public will want to spend subsidies in order to obtain higher priced food.Meanwhile, the Nikkei posted a story taking to task the Japanese government's flawed and contradictory approach to moving that country's farming in the opposite direction: toward larger units of production. The article states that the effort to increase farm scale from an average of 2 hectares to 20-30 hectares has gone nowhere as a result "ever-changing rule and seemingly contradictory programs."...
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...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.