In 2012, global trade in alfalfa hit 1.7 MMT and there was great optimism that it would continue to grow as a valuable forage crop. In fact, it hit the milestone a few years earlier of being the most cultivated forage legume in the world. But ongoing expansion was not to be. Since 2012, the amount of alfalfa traded globally has shrunk by an average -0.8 percent per year. It is the fourth most widely grown crop in the U.S. but remains a niche product, both in terms of where it is produced and the animals that consume it. Some blame the approval of GM alfalfa in 2010, but other field crops yield more energy and thus win the economic battle. ...
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.