War on Big Ag At a conference hosted by anti-Big Ag activist group Farm Action, vegan and anti-Big Ag U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) called for a moratorium on Combined Animal Feed Operations (CAFO’s). He called the large livestock feeding enterprises cruel to animals, environmentally harmful and said they divert government resources from small farmers. Booker sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee but is unlikely to find many supporters on the panel for his positions. Separately, environmental groups are complaining that the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management and USDA’s Forest Service are charging western cattle ranchers the same fee for grazing their animals on federal land that was set 37 years...
A federal appeals court paused a USITC ruling against President Trump’s use of Section 122 to impose 10-percent global tariffs. A bipartisan group of 80 House members asked USTR to investigate specialty crop imports from Mexico for unfair trade practices. India notified the WT...
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.