Farm Bill and Water For the first time in history, the federal government may intercede and impose restrictions on the water withdrawal by states in the Colorado River basin. The draft plan would reduce allocations to Arizona, California, and Nevada, likely spreading the pain evenly. The move came shortly after former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said his former agency should look at using emergency authorities to cut Colorado river basin water allocations to agriculture. The shortage allocation model released as part of the proposal does not mention agriculture, though the sector uses 80 percent of the Colorado River’s water. The White House goal is to force the states involved to arrive at an agreement rather than force a polit...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
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.