Today's unusual defeat in the U.S. House of a major farm bill proposal reflects many new dynamics, not the least of which is the urbanization of America. It proved that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was correct last year in calculating that a bill could not be passed in the body, and wrong this year for assuming anything had changed. The farm bill, which has historically been fought over on regional grounds rather than political partisanship, has now joined most other areas in the battle of left versus right.Domestic food assistance via the SNAP program was ground zero for the philosophical debate over economics. The right sees food aid growing so fast that it contributes to reduced labor ambition, thus amendments...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
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.