USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack will help host December's U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade in Chicago. This will be an excellent opportunity for waging a serious, face-to-face challenge of Beijing's stalled biotech approval process. Korea the Worst U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker defended the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) for having delivered tangible results even though one of those is an even wider American trade deficit. On the whole, free trade agreements have tended to improve the U.S. trade balance. The problems, at least in agriculture, are the ones unaddressed by the KORUS such as the fact that Korea maintains the second-highest producer subsidies in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and De...
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
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.