Tight Margins Prevent Disruption While populist politicians complain about corporate greed, the businesses with long term success in agriculture achieve their success via tight margins. Bloomberg notes that upstarts in the “agrifoodtech” space like Farmers Edge Inc. and Gro Intelligence failed to disrupt the sector like eBay, Uber and Amazon. That is because they contrasted the price of a bushel of wheat and the cost of a loaf of bread and mistakenly assumed some arbitrage opportunity. The upstarts reveal not just their ignorance of how the sector works but that of the investors that handed them billions of dollars to waste. Hungary Isn’t Hungry Hungary assumes the six-month rotating presidency of the EU in July and in...
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
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.