Strange Bedfellows The oil industry and U.S. agriculture have long conflicted with one another. The oil industry strongly opposed the ethanol blending mandate pushed through the Congress by the agriculture sector. Ethanol not only replaced the oil industry’s gasoline, but it also created supply chain hurdles due to its hygroscopic nature. Now the oil industry is backing an agriculture sector push to mandate a nationwide E15 blend. Why the change? Big Oil has always suffered from reputational animosity due to its perceived monopolistic control over an economic necessity. By contrast, polling shows nearly 90 percent of Americans trust farmers. Now that climate change policies are seeking to eliminate petroleum, the industry needs conti...
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.