Productivity Impacts The Kansas City Federal Reserve kicked off its annual conference on agriculture with this year’s topic seemingly a little tin eared. The focus is on productivity. Topics include the role of research and development, technology and data, and spillover effects on the supply chain. There is a session on the environment, but it is not the one that those opposed to conventional agriculture want to hear. Instead of repeating the popular story that agriculture is destroying the planet, the Bank somehow found the opposite – that productivity reduces adverse impacts on the environment. By increasing productivity, the U.S. uses 25 percent less land and less water for farming than in 1950. While activists want agricul...
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
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.