All eyes are shifting to the Senate following the House passage of a farm bill last Thursday. Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Arkansas) is targeting the end of May or early June for a bill markup. According to Boozman, the House “going ahead and passing something was really helpful to us. Congress wants to get a farm bill done.” The Senate is not expected to be in session the last week of May. A recess is slated to begin 23 May, with lawmakers returning 1 June. Unlike in the House, where the bill could pass with a simple majority, the Senate version will require 60 votes to clear the filibuster, which means securing at least seven Democrats. There were 14 Democrats who voted for the bill in the House. The pass...
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.