The responses and repercussions of the COVID-19 spread continue at a breakneck speed, one of the latest being the indefinite shut down of the JBS pork plant in Sioux Falls, Iowa which has a 19,000 head per day slaughter capacity. This comes after a temporary shutdown at the Tyson pork plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa (10,100 head/day) and the JBS plant in Souderton, Pennsylvania (1,350 head/day). That is about 6 percent (based on 5.3 days of operation) of the January slaughter rates. In Congress, the Senate is in pro forma session and on Thursday last week Republicans proposed adding $250 billion for the small business paycheck protection program, but Democrats wanted to add new funding for hospitals, localities and additional funds for SN...
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.