The think tank RethinkX issued a report with a 24-word, 166-character title predicting the end of the conventional meat industry by 2030. Entitled, ‘Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030: The Second Domestication of Plants and Animals, the Disruption of the Cow, and the Collapse of Industrial Livestock Farming,’ may correctly predict that “modern food products will cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.” However, when we surveyed this question back in May, around one-third called meat alternatives a “significant trend” but one-half said the market was more like that for organic foods. If RethinkX is correct, the livestock producers and processors mos...
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.
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...